 This is very exciting collaboration, which will use Kisser brand new research vessel called Al-Mustakshif to conduct marine research. The ship name Al-Mustakshif means the explorer. Couldn't be more appropriate since we will explore and be exploring crucial aspects and you have a model over there. I hope you took a photo of ocean health that have not yet been closely researched. This joint initiative offers a unique opportunity to fill important knowledge gaps about the ocean that can help shape effective policies for protecting and preserving marine ecosystems as well as climate change mitigation and strategies. Now I would like to introduce our honorable speakers today. We have with us Mr. Rafael Mariano-Grossi, the Director General of International Atomic Energy Agency. And we have with us from Kisser, Dr. Sameer Al-Zionki, Executive Director of Environmental Life Center in Kuwait. And I'm also pleased to introduce Mr. Peter Thompson, United Nations Secretary General, Special Envoy for the Ocean, and Mrs. Inger Andersen, Executive Director, United Nation Environmental Program. Welcome and please give a close to thank our partners for being here. Now it's my great pleasure to invite our Director General, Mr. Grossi, strong advocate of the role of science and technology, whether on adaptation or mitigation of climate change, ocean health being an important part of it. The floor is yours, DG. Thank you. Thank you very much, Najat. Thank you all for being here. And I would like to thank, of course, my Kuwaiti partners, but also my UN close friends and partners, Inger, and of course, Basel Thompson, with whom we have been working different places and in different ways and in different configurations. And this is yet another proof, another manifestation of our joint determination from our respective responsibilities and roles to come together as we should when things as important as what brings us together today come up. I think I don't want to repeat what Najat said because she really recalled and reminded us of the kind of work that through nuclear techniques and applications we can do in terms of the protection of the oceans. There are other environmental areas in the world, but in particular today is about this, you know, how isotopic hydrology is essential, is an essential tool to understand better, to get the indispensable information to guide policy, in the protection of the environment without reliable data is impossible. So to do this and also to mitigate through specific approaches. And we are extremely happy because Kuwait has unique capacities that it has decided to share with us as a platform to work we intend to carry out in this region, which has marine environment, fish sediment, the water that needs to be protected. And so they have been extremely generous and in collaboration with our laboratories of marine environmental protection in Monaco. We have started the work and we have some experts here back of the room from our Monaco laboratories. We are going to be targeting a number of projects. We are going to be starting on a number of projects. Today, we are going to be able to celebrate that aboard Al-Muqtefshif, I hope. It would be nice to do a round of bay if possible, but I think I've been told that that could be a bit too much for an evening, but I'm sure that we are going to be able to do that when I visit Kuwait next year. So frankly, my contribution here today is to indicate in a very concrete way how the IEA is putting all its scientific apparatus at the service of the protection of our planet. So I welcome that and I'm so happy to work with Kuwait as a partner and also with UNEP, with the Special Envoy of the Secretary General for the Ocean, who has been a champion of this cause for quite some time. So the IEA is about very technical things, so we are there to complement and supplement policies to give them the sustain they need to do good. And this is what we are planning to do together. So thank you again for sharing with us these few minutes. I know that everybody is running from one event to the other, so just to welcome you, listen from you, and to say that in the IEA we will always have an ally, a partner for this noble cause that has us all together here. So thank you very much for being here with us. Thank you, Director General, and now I would like to give the floor to our partner collaborator, Dr. Samir Al-Zenki, on behalf of KISSER to really describe the activities, and I know that you are spearheading the activities in the region, in marine environment, and how do you see this partnership and the Ocean Health IEA KISSER joint project? Thank you very much, your Excellency, and thank you very much for also the UN counterparts, and also from the Ocean Health. KISSER started working on this initiative maybe 12 to 13 years ago in relation to trying to improve the marine ecosystem in our region in general and also in Kuwait in specific. The center that I represent holds a lot of activities related to marine restoration, and also looking at trying to reduce the impact of climate change. From my understanding working with Dr. Nader and the team who is represented by Dr. Saif and other scientists, the IEA has been a valuable partner. We've conducted a lot of research activities, joint and collaborative research that was really fruitful, not only for Kuwait, but also for the region. And this is translated in some regional projects that we have with other partners in the GCC and also in the MENA region. This activity that we are launching today comes as part of a government initiative for upgrading all the research facilities, trying to address the growing changes and the impacts of climate change. So this activity started with inaugurating the ship in 2009 and because of the COVID issue, we delayed some of the research but now the ship is ready. We are looking to see if we can introduce a number of activities that we can carry together with the IEA and also partners in the region trying to address the major issues that not only impacts the region but the world as a whole. This is Kuwait's contribution to the world. We'll try to make the best of it with our partners, of course. And we hope that this will also have an impact on the population, the future generation to come, and also for the livelihood of people who are living in this planet. Thank you very much, your excellency, and thank you for the partners for coming today and hope that we'll have a chance today to go and see the Mustekhshif and visit it and also maybe talk more about what kind of activities are a priority to the world. And then we try to maybe work together in trying to initiate these activities as soon as possible. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Sameer. It's indeed a call for partnership because together the aim is really to do more, to collect more data, more information on open sea in the main region and beyond. But we are calling also on partnerships because this is, we need more hands. We need also support and this is about data and quality, data for informative decision. Thank you very much. I know that you, Mrs. Anderson, you need to go to another meeting so I'm going to give you the floor right away. And I would like to thank you for being here with us. I know you have been dedicated, you have dedicated much of your career to promote environmental science and you are now the convener of the Gongou in negotiation on the legally-bending treaty on plastic pollution, including marine environment. And so the work that we are going to do together basically is also sampling marine, water marine soil to look at microplastics. So I give you the floor to give us some of your thoughts on this. And let me first of all congratulate IAEA on my dear colleague Rafael and of course Peter. But especially because just two weeks ago you hosted the foresight event with scientists from all over the MENA region here in, well, in this region, but in beautiful Kuwait, precisely bringing Kisser's muscle and strength and reach. And so we are always in very close contact with Kisser and very, very impressed with your work. Look, the oceans, and you will hear that from Peter as well, are these innocents. They're just there and they kind of take whatever you give to them. The stuff that comes out of the rivers, the stuff that runs over off our fields, fertilize, insecticides, pesticides, the CO2 we emit, they will take it up. It will come in because they have no other way. And that's a story with the oceans. And I think that when we know what IAEA has done and the kind of work that you've been doing through the laboratory in Monaco, with which we have had collaboration since the 70s, some 12, 13, 14 conventions, jurisdiction within national, biodiversity within national jurisdiction have been born in UNEP. Some have rolled off the conveyor belt and are now independent. Others are still with UNEP. Some seven, eight are still with UNEP. But there's that collaboration still on the marine issues. But as you rightly mentioned, two years ago, after a lot of work by many, many dedicated people, understanding that these 200 million tons of plastic that roll into our oceans every year, the solution is not to fish it out of the oceans. The solution is stop to entering it into the oceans. I mean, we still have to deal with what's already there. But the point is that we have to halt pollution in the oceans, including obviously plastic. So we are in a process of negotiating a new treaty, and it shall be ambitious. It is clear that the only way we can do that is three-fold. One, eliminate the unnecessary. The thing you use for five minutes, it will have 500 years' lifetime. Why? There are alternatives for that. We understand. Innovate the product itself, the product that we envelope in plastic. Does it have to be liquid? Can it be dry? We all remember when soap was a bar and soap powder was powder, and all of a sudden we needed to pump because we couldn't do this with a bar. So we can rethink cosmetics, cleaning, et cetera, doesn't have to be liquid. And of course, we need to then, when we have eliminated and reduced, we need to have clear targets for how much recycled content in the plastic that we must have. And those targets are a little bit like the 1.5 or the 2 degrees. By X, so much content, by Y, I'm talking years, this much content. That's the journey we are on. And we need to be clear about the polymers of concerns and chemicals of concern. Because if you have a polymer with PFAS, you can't recycle it and make it into a Coke bottle or whatever, right? So we need to have clarity around the context. This is where the work of IAEA, of Kisser and many others becomes so critical because you will help to monitor what's going into the oceans. Now, we want to stop it, but we need to have an understanding of what it is and the chemicals that it releases. The truth is that these chemicals never really disappear. They just become ever smaller fragments in the end from plastic, large plastic, to pieces, to micro, to nano. It's still around. And it's in the air you breathe, in the water you drink, in the carpets that are here, in the paint. And that means that 98% of people, it's in our bodies and in our blood, it's in the placenta of the woman that has given birth. It's in the blood of the newborn baby. And this is clearly an area where our friends at WHO are working a lot and something that we have to face out. So I hope that with these many partnerships across many different places, our oceans, our landscapes, our health, our future, plastic is an amazing material. We are not anti-plastic. We're anti-plastic in the environment. We're anti-unnecessary plastic. And this is the road that we're journeying. So thank you very much for allowing me to come. Thank you. Thank you, Mrs. Anderson. Thank you. Thank you, director. Absolutely. And we hope that UNEP, as our usual partner, will join us in this journey with Kissar to really look for information and more data in open seas. Thank you very much. Now, I have the honor and the pleasure to give the floor to Ambassador Thompson, the United Nations Secretary, General Special Envoy for the Ocean, who is a global advocate for the preservation and sustainable use of our ocean, not only in his present role, but earlier as leading diplomat from Fiji and as president of the UN General Assembly and organizer of the 2017 Ocean Conference. Now, Ambassador Thompson, we are just a couple of months ahead of the Ocean Decades Conference. How do you see this joint venture with Kissar that will contribute to the gap that is missing in marine information and marine data? Great. Well, first of all, Director General, thanks so much for putting this on, and it's such an important meeting, and I'm really looking forward to going and seeing the ship with our Kuwaiti colleagues, and I'll say why, but also to the Executive Director of UNEP. I think we could all just sit here and talk plastic now for the next five hours and be just engrossed by what she's going to tell us. As a grandfather myself, I try and keep plastic away from my grandchildren. Why? Because I do believe that plastic is a plague on the planet and it's not good for their health. That's my personal view. But anyway, we're not here to talk plastic. Well, we sort of are. We're more about ocean science and the collection of data. That's really what the vessel will be doing. And that, first of all, I want to say how excited I am about this vessel. Why do I say that? An honest assessment of where ocean science is coming from and where ocean data is coming from shows that the Middle East is lacking. So this Qatar initiative is filling a very important void, very important, and as I say, I'm really excited about the work that will be done. It's strange that that is the situation because it's not as if there's a lack of funds in the region, because when you look at the region, it's basically like an island. You've got sea to the west, to the south, to the east, and you're surrounded by sea. And of course, the Arab tradition, or when you think of the Daos and the trading and so on, that went on, it's very much a marine tradition. People think of the Arab people as more desert people, but no, you were the great traders on the ocean long before the Portuguese started. And so that rich heritage is now being translated finally into modern ocean research and why do we need that? We need that because we only know about maybe at best 20% of the scientific properties of the ocean. It's incredible to think that. When you think that 95% of life on the planet is hosted in the ocean, we only know about 20% of the ocean science. That's our best estimate. It's probably a lot lower than that. So research is what's called for. And you know the slogan of the UN Decade of Ocean Science? You know, the science we need for the ocean we want? Well, actually it's for the planet we want and the conditions on the planet that we want for our species to survive, because without a healthy ocean, we don't have a healthy planet and we can't survive. So that sort of encapsulates what the Director General was saying earlier about the importance of this research. So you asked me to say something about Barcelona. The UN Decade of Ocean Science is underway now. We're about halfway through. Ocean Science is getting more attention now than at any stage in human history. That's the good news. Anyway, we're going to assess that in Barcelona mid-April next year. And then of course we're rolling on from there to the UN Ocean Conference in June, in Nice, where the Director General, where the forum on Ocean Science is being held for about three or four days before the start of the UN Ocean Conference, there will be in Nice this special Congress on Ocean Science and they're expecting thousands of ocean scientists to be there and I know that Quitar will be amongst them. And I'll go further and I will say that when I'm having dinner this week with the Crown Prince of Monaco, I'll be saying to him that I visited your research vessel, inshallah, and that it should be welcomed in Monaco at the IAEA Research Labs, which is the world's centre, of course, for this research. And you know that the Prince's family for many generations has been passionately involved in ocean research. So he'll be very happy to hear about Quitar's initiative. Sorry, Quitar, what did I say? Quitar, it's okay. You know, I just came from Quitar and Morocco last week at what country I went. So that will be a fantastic thing to look forward to. So all in all, you know, this is not, you know, a joy ride for us. This is about existential matters. You know, we were on a highway to hell at the moment. The Secretary-General has declared a red alert for humanity. Three degrees is not liveable for our grandchildren. So what we're doing and talking about today is about making the world liveable for our grandchildren. That's what we're setting out to do. So we need this science, we need this data to be able to make the right decisions. So I thank Quitar. So Quitar, Quitar. No, no, how do you say your organisation? Quitar, yeah, that's what I'm trying to say. Not Quitar, no. Okay, so thank you so much. Thank you and definitely... Thank you and definitely together with colleagues from Kiser, we will be there at the conference on science for oceans and we will contribute our drop into science we need for the planet, science we want for the planet we need and for the oceans we need, definitely. Now, I love the fact that you are emphasising that this is a gift to humanity. That's the right approach for ocean science and for science generally. It's something for us all to share. Thank you. Now, I have the pleasure to introduce virtually our colleagues, I mean, Mr. Vladimir Ryabinik, Executive Secretary under Governmental Geographic Commission of UNESCO. He, unfortunately, could not join us, but he sent the video message. Thank you if you could play it. Ladies and gentlemen, all curfew is a subject. I would like to thank IEA and Kuwait Institute for scientific research, for organising this event and inviting me. I would like to greet you also on behalf of the Governmental Geographic Commission of UNESCO, simply by receive, which is the home of ocean sciences in the United Nations system. So my main message is basically that addressing climate change and protecting ocean life are two essential issues and they are all dependent, particularly dependent on ocean science and observations. The solutions that we are seeking are not linear and actually have a new approach to using the nation's keeping ocean alive, making sure that the ocean continues to support people is associated with sustainable ocean planning of management and the key beneficiary and key player there is sustainable ocean economy and the private sector. So what are the issues that state? First of all, the future of the private sector. The ocean is going to produce 500 institutions, 60 countries participating in the 50 large-scale programs of the decade and also nearly 300 projects. So this is the total new level of ocean science. But this is not sufficient. We also need to change attitude of people to the ocean. This is one of the desired outcomes of the decade. And we are trying to achieve it through the approach which is called ocean literacy. We are teaching people about the role of the ocean in their lives and also how their habits and how their aspirations are fed to the ocean. And not many people know this. Not many people know the basic facts, for example, but more than 50% of the oxygen in the earth comes from the ocean base for the synthesis. So people need to know the role of the ocean in their lives and this is going to change the situation in the world because only we can protect what we love and we love only what we know. So in this particular case, we would like to also highlight the novel and important matters that are developed by IEA through, for example, its marine environment laboratories. This is making a big difference in the ocean inventory. So we are working with IEA towards a project on ocean classification. This is a great combination. But the prospects are also existing in some other areas and the nuclear tracing of pollutants is a new element that needs to be further developed and it is going to, I think, provide very important contribution to multi-dimensional assimilation of various types of ocean label. So I would like to say, suppose to experience the revolution in the numerical representation of the ocean. So there are many opportunities there. I would like to invite you to come to the Ocean Decade conference that is going to be in Barcelona in April 2024 and there will be all opportunities presented there. You will be able to see how the ocean revolution, ocean science revolution is taking place and be a part of that movement towards the science we need for the ocean we want. So I would like to continue this one statement. Ocean is a sick patient. It has many diseases. And it is treated by many doctors. The problem is that the doctors do not speak to each other. In order to really cure the patient, not just treat the diseases, we need to have a plan of working together, focusing also on climate, focusing on ocean health. And this event is going to take us forward towards a more coherent approach towards managing the ocean on the basis of science. I would like to thank you for your attention. Thank you for listening. And also I would like to thank IEA for organizing this important side event. All the best. Fantastic. Thank you very much. And definitely we hope that's UNESCO also will join us in this endeavor and be our partner in joining IEA Kissar project. Now I would like to thank all of our speakers for their insights for remarks and about global priorities for protecting our ocean health. And now it's time for a quick family photo before we head for the port to visit the guided tour to the al-Mustakshif and have a small reception there. Thank you.