 Hi, I'm Dan Costa, Professor and Director of the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of California at Santa Cruz, a member of the Ocean Studies Board and a member of the UN Ocean Committee. And I'm a study physiological ecology of upper trophic levels. Hello, everybody. I'm David Miller with Fugro. I'm Government Accounts Director for the Americas region. But I also lead our engagement and participation in the UN Ocean decade globally. I'm Stacy Karris. I'm a Senior Program Officer with the Ocean Studies Board. Hi, I'm Craig McLean. I'm retired from the level of representation that Nicole now holds. And I was at the IOC for 11 years and spent four of it trying to help build the decade. And I'm anxious to see what the progress is that we're making here. Thank you very much. Liz, you want to come up to the table? Good afternoon, everyone. Liz Turpac from NOAA, but I also serve as the Chair of the Interagency Working Group for the Ocean Decade. Selina. Hi, everyone. I'm Selina Harris. I'm a Canals Fellow supporting the Ocean Decade portfolio at NOAA. Okay, now for our online. I'm just going to go through the list as it is appearing on my computer. So, Amy. Yeah, Amy Bauer, a member of the Ocean Studies Board, a Senior Scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Physical Oceanography. Scott. I'm Scott Glenn, a Professor of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers. So a member of the Ocean Studies Board, the US National Committee for the Decade and several years ago, I was Chair of that US Committee for the IOC that worked with Craig. Paul? Hi, Paul Williams, a Fisheries Policy Coordinator for the Suquamish Tribe, a member of the Ocean Studies Board. Thomas Chance. Yes, I'm Thomas Chance. I'm a founder and former CEO of CNC Technologies and founder and former CEO of ASV Global, and I'm a member of the OSB. Hi, Adam. Here on. Yes, hi, Adam Blimquist, US State Department Office of Ocean and Polar Affairs. I'm a co-chair of the Interagency Working Group on the Decade. Allison Reed. Hi everyone, Allison Reed also at the State Department Office of Ocean and Polar Affairs, and I cover the IOC for us. I serve as a second backup to Nicole at the IOC meetings. So I'm not going to call on all of you. So I'm going to do the ones who are, you know, involved in the committee. So, Charlotte. Good afternoon, all Charlotte Hudson. I direct the Lundfest Ocean Program and I am on the UN Decade Advisory Board. Mark Spalding, please. Hi, I'm Mark Spalding. I'm the president of the Ocean Foundation. And I am on the Ocean Studies Board. And with Charlotte Hudson and part of the Foundation's dialogue for the Decade. Mark Abbott. Yeah, president, Mark Abbott, president emeritus of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and member of the Ocean Studies Board as well as the US National Committee for the UN Decade. Rosie Alagato. I'm Rosie Alagato, associate professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and I'm a member of the Ocean Studies Board and the US National Committee for the Decade. Okay, so I think I got everyone who's on the US National Committee or engaged in the Ocean Decade. But if I missed anyone, please go ahead and raise your hand and introduce yourself. Oh, Galen. Galen, I'm sorry I missed you. Go. Hi, Galen McKinley. I'm at Columbia University in La Montdority. I'm on the Ocean Studies Board, and that's a member of the US Decade Committee. And then I'm also a member of the working group for one group five on for the Ocean Decade. Thanks. Thank you, Galen. And, yeah, and so for anyone else on the line, feel free to use the chat function to introduce yourself to the rest of the group. With that, I'd like to issue a very warm welcome to Nicola Boff, who's joining us today. She's the new, relatively new. I think representative, US representative to the IOC and joining us from NOAA. Thank you very much, Susan. Any advice here? Am I advancing slides or will someone, if I, if I am, I don't know how to. Safa should be doing that. I'll do that right now. Okay, so much. I have multiple computers, but I don't think any of them are searched as slides. Good afternoon, everyone. It's wonderful to be with you today. And of course, although the IOC and the UN Decade are not one in the same, they certainly overlap and are related. So I'm really pleased to be here to offer some IOC key takeaways from the meeting this year, but also UN Decade related activities that we discussed at the IOC. Many thanks to Susan and to Larry, who is not with us today for the invitation to talk about the 2023 IOC assembly meeting and the happenings there that I think you all will be interested in. For me, being the US representative is really an opportunity to advance the work of the IOC, of course, including the work of the UN Decade, but also to advance US priorities with regard to ocean science across the board. I'm also pleased to convey that after doing some digging deep into the IOC files at NOAA and the Department of State, we just learned that I am the first woman to serve as the US representative to the IOC in the history of the organization, which is amazing. I'm honored to be the US representative generally and I am sorry we missed that opportunity to shout from the rooftops, but that was not made available information to me so we dug it out and here we are so very important first I think for the United States. I want to thank the IOC team for doing all of that work to dig into the files and find that out. As you all are probably no strangers to the work of the IOC is more important than ever. I was really excited to jump right in at the general assembly meeting in the assembly meeting in June at this past June at UNESCO headquarters. And although I was new to the IOC, the US delegation is very, very strong. The NOAA and State Department representatives know their stuff they've been going to this meetings they have great trust to relationships. So I was really welcomed with a red carpet and I and I owe a lot of that to them. We were very successful I will say we achieved every one of our policy objectives both those that we knew about when we came in with and others that crept up along the way so it was a very successful meeting over two weeks. I read a lot about the practices of the IOC but also about the friendly and productive nature of the folks that go to those meetings it was just very welcoming and very collaborative. I was also encouraged about all the different opportunities I saw for working with the IOC and in the service of the IOC to leverage the US efforts and priorities to improve ocean sustainable ocean use as well as observations and data policy as much else. So the work we do through the IOC programs and regional bodies of course is very critical to meeting US and global needs in terms of setting ourselves up for a healthy ocean. Throughout the assembly we focused on many, many topics, including, oh, sorry, please slide to. Thank you very much, including a warning and mitigation systems for ocean hazards international oceanographic data and information exchanges. The IOC and its role facilitating the UN decade has been important UNESCO is really stepping up into a leadership role with regard to ocean issues in fact it's branding itself on social media I don't know if you've noticed as branding the IOC as UNESCO ocean. And really doing a lot in that space to make it known that UNESCO is associated with the IOC and its work. So all the more reason to build on those relationships and to find out what we can do to tap into the priorities of the other UNESCO bodies, given the importance of the ocean. We are already taking steps to increase our footprint at the IOC itself. Noah's Argo program manager, Dr. Emily Smith recently began a year long secondment or assignment to support the IOC goose program there. Working with goose will provide Dr. Smith with an opportunity to benefit the US IOC team with a better understanding of how other countries are planning and executing their observation programs. But also how those national efforts nest into the broader goose framework. Goose is really at a critical point as it navigates and positions itself working with the WMO again with the UN decade as well as engaging additional public partnerships and so we're really fortunate to have this person from the United States there to have a presence on the ground for goose. And I thank Dr. Smith's home office at NOAA for providing resources to allow her to be there. We are always open to other possible pathways for on the ground presence at the IOC secretariat. Should anyone be interested in providing that kind of support, feel free to reach out and we'll find figure out if there's something available or something that we can do. Next slide please. The United States is also working to retain and was successful at retaining leadership positions within the governance of the IOC. During the assembly meeting in June member states elected the executive council for 2023 to 2025. The United States retained its seat on the IOC executive council. Foreign Affairs Officer Allison Reed who is with us today serves as the US delegate to the executive council so she will continue to do so that's good news. Candidates for the executive council chair and vice chairs were uncontested and elected without a vote. The chair will be Yutaka Michira of Japan and the group one vice chair for the IOC electoral group. That's the group in which the United States sits will be Marie Alexandrine Secret of France. It's good to have friends in high places. So very supportive of both of them. The IOC executive council also provided input on the appointment of the next IOC executive secretary. The top US choices for the new executive secretary are among the six finalists. That are have been forwarded to the UNESCO director general for interview. It's the UNESCO DG that does interview those folks for the hiring of the executive secretary. So based on the list of those that we are aware of as the candidates that went forward, we feel confident that the DG will hire someone with very qualified and good colleague to work with as the new executive secretary. We expect to hear an announcement soon. We understand that the new executive secretary announcement may be imminent, but we all know how the hiring process goes so maybe stay tuned but don't hold your breath. We are looking forward to that. And as for the outgoing executive secretary, the United States has of course enjoyed a very productive working relationship with Vladimir Rabinin during his tenure. He received a heartfelt send off from the member states at the assembly in June. He will definitely be missed, but I look forward to getting to know the new person when they get onboarded hopefully soon. Next slide please. And of course, while we were at the IOC assembly meeting in Paris, the director general of UNESCO convened an extraordinary session at the request or at the prompting of government of Japan for the general conference to meet and to vote on allowing the United States to rejoin UNESCO. The IOC delegations were not directly involved in the vote, but it was happening right across the hallway was buzz applause, all the stuff so it was really kind of fun to be there. Soon after that affirming vote in Paris the United States took the necessary sort of paperwork steps to actually become a full UNESCO member once again. And of course as you all know, and as Craig can attest, the United States remained an active voting member of the IOC during the time we withdrew from UNESCO, but rejoining UNESCO really offers up an opportunity to move more strongly as an advocate for IOC budget and to encourage collaboration with other relevant UNESCO entities. The United States presence in UNESCO and in Paris is building back up. We already have an increased appointment or increased presence with the appointment of Ambassador Erica Barks Ruggles as the head of the reestablished US mission to UNESCO. I got to meet Ambassador Barks Ruggles at a UNESCO reception in August, and was thrilled to hear that her background is in marine biology. So I can hardly believe our good fortune I wanted to hug her and I may have, I may have that the US mission is going to be led by someone who really understands the importance of coastal and ocean issues, and how they're central to the climate conversations I mean I think I actually said to her, I don't have to explain this to you do I she said nope. Fantastic. We're off to the races and then just a little bit later I heard a lot about ocean and climate incidentally at New York climate week. More about that, if you wish. I also conveyed to Ambassador Barks Ruggles that the IOC needs her attention. Immediately and has resourcing needs. She gets that as well. I look forward to continuing my discussions with her, and would welcome any suggestions the National Committee might have on topics that I might raise with her we're going to try and get me on a regular cadence. So it would be open to hearing what you guys think on that. The US rejoining UNESCO is is not a windfall for UNESCO and this was something that we're talking a lot with other countries about our understanding is that rejoining allows the US current contributions that are being made and you may have heard some of this to cover our factors and not necessarily go toward the IOC budget or the UNESCO budget, making it larger. This is important to note because we are in a very positive way, having to level set expectations with some of our colleagues that the return to UNESCO is a very positive thing we're looking forward to it but it is not a windfall, necessarily for the budget. So there is a budget increase, hopefully on the horizon from other means. Next slide please. At the assembly we had an opportunity to work with the United Kingdom and others to build a strategic and inclusive approach to the distribution of an expected increase in the IOC's allocation from the UNESCO budget. Earlier this year at the UNESCO Executive Board meeting there was an agreement to increase IOC's allocation of the UNESCO budget from 2% of the UNESCO budget to 3% of the UNESCO budget. I know everybody take a breath. Very exciting. This is the first such budget increase in the history of the IOC so it is a big deal, and you can see it does amount to about $16 million. Nothing, right? But starting to do some higher math here, not nothing but certainly a big deal for the IOC. This proposed increase still requires formal adoption by UNESCO member states at the General Conference in November. It is expected to pass. I plan to be there to cheer on the vote. This again is the first budget increase that IOC has ever received from UNESCO. And the first time that the IOC will be set up to provide more than a just a peanut butter approach. If you're in budgeting, you know, it's just spread it out evenly, right? Because of our negotiations in June, if passed, about half of this 1% increase will be allocated to IOC core functions relatively evenly. The other half will go to certain IOC programs that we identified as critically vulnerable, but core programmatic areas that require stable resourcing, including IODE, GUEs, capacity development, as well as regional subsidiary bodies. As a recovering budget we need, I was really pleased to be directly involved in those negotiations, including helping to guide the expected increase to the IOC's operating budget. I intend to stay personally and directly involved in these conversations as we move for that 1st year of allocation of the funds at a minimum to see that they are reflective of what we negotiated and reflective of US priorities, including being more responsive than ever to the needs of the regional bodies, which are so woefully underfunded. Next slide please. Speaking of the regional bodies throughout the assembly, the IOC subcommissions and regional committees provided updates and report on their most recent regional meetings and their growing requirements. Next slide please. As much of you all know, sorry for that kind of squashed, the decade coordination offices live within the IOC original and technical subsidiary bodies and programs that was noted of course by us and our negotiations. They facilitate decade regional and thematic coordination and engagement activities are critically important to the to the decade. Next slide please. Of note from the IOC general assembly, a couple of decade relevant outcomes and accomplishments include IOC Africa highlighted the release of the ocean decade Africa roadmap and adopted recommendations for the UN decade, including with regards to GUEs, Africa, resource mobilization and budget. This was exciting to hear we were certainly committed to this partnership already and look forward to continuing our support for their ocean observing and other capacity needs. West pack continues to be a regional leader for the decade, including announcing for new program working groups and a progress report on the 16 decade actions in the region. In addition, the second ocean decade regional conference and 11th international marine science conference will be held in Thailand in 2024. This flagship event will take stock of the first three years of their achievement of UN decade actions and likely identify future priorities for that region. IO Caribe introduced a new board of directors, including the reelection of Noah's own Dr. John Cortina's eight endorsed decade actions in the region and the task force for which the solicitation was circulated to this national committee and to the nexus. Notably also the regional committee for the central Indian Ocean or IOC Indio was elevated to a commit from a committee to a subcommission bringing with it increased resources and funds for that region and getting into the wire for our budget resolution which was a very good thing for them. Next slide please. A lot happened. It was a very busy meeting in other news for resolutions were passed several decisions were adopted. I'll highlight just a few high level outcomes relevant to your work, but you can see the list. If you have any questions about any of these other outcomes, please don't hesitate to reach out. We can get you more information. This slide just shows a list of the decisions and resolutions. Many of these again were key to us priorities, including those related to the data policy Argo floats and the global climate observing system. Relevant to the UN decade the assembly supported new IOC led decade actions, including the ocean decade tsunami program and the strengthening of resilience of coastal communities in the Northeast Atlantic and the Mediterranean just to name a couple. The assembly also passed a resolution recognizing you in decade implementation welcoming the development of the ocean decade vision 2030 and noting the establishment of the new decade coordinating mechanisms such as the collaborative centers and the coordination offices that I alluded to earlier. As you all know, the vision 2030 process is going to provide the answer to what a success look like at the end of the decade taking stock of trends gaps priority user needs and identifying key key targets and milestones to ensure that we're making the best impact we can. I am looking forward to the multi-staker holder working groups assembled by vision 2030 and to discussing these outcomes at the I with the IOC community at the UN decade ocean conference in Barcelona next spring. Next slide please. And we take great pictures. We took a lot of pictures. It was a it was a it was a picture worthy week for sure. You can see with the secretariat. And in the in the very, very modern room. No, it's not modern at all. But it's good to be there. No is investment in IOC but also in the UN decade and this committee is important to us. It provides the necessary framework to ensure that we are contributing thought contributing thoughtfully to the decade for the best outcome for all of us and. There are increasing number of ocean related activities around the world. I'm encouraged by this and I welcome this. But now that I've seen the IOC in action. It is truly my belief that the IOC and its expertise should remain at the heart of our multilateral efforts to understand and convey to others what we don't yet understand about the ocean and the changes it's going. This speaks to our interest in staying strong with IOC staying strong with the UN decade because within this sort of ever complex ecosystem of ocean initiatives and activities. I think the IOC in the UN decade both offer some of our strongest opportunities to keep science at the core of our ocean related conversations. We know that we all knew I think that the UN ocean decade was going to be a big endeavor. And it still is I will say that it I believe it certainly raised the profile of the IOC within UNESCO and with the UN system, at least on social media. No, I think it actually has. And I think that budgetary increase that was proposed last year or earlier this year that was likely to pass is likely to pass in November is its success. I believe is due at least in part to the UN decade visibility on these issues. I'm really keen to understand how IOC leadership can continue to promote the UN decade as well as the other IOC programs. I'm really excited to help the other federal agencies have some meaningful outcomes, both at the IOC and with the UN decade so with that really look forward to discussion I appreciate your time very very much. Happy to answer any questions you may have. With that, I think I'll stop. Thank you very much. Oh yeah, this is our sort of our ocean decade by the numbers. Thank you. Thank you so much, Nicole really appreciate you joining us here today and giving us that overview of the IOC meeting and that great news about rejoining UNESCO and and really thinking about, you know, sort of, it opens up some new opportunities I think for the US and our international work. So we can now take questions from both of our US National Committee members but I also invite the audience as well to participate. So if you if you're on zoom please use your zoom hand and otherwise if you're in the room you know you can shout out or put up your arms just like the old days and I'll call on you. I see Scott has his hand up so Scott. Yeah, thank you Nicole that was a great overview really appreciate all that it's great to see the progress especially with those regional alliances coming along. That's very critical that's where a lot of the work gets done. It's been great to see the US leadership helping some of the emerging goose networks, move on to mature networks. That was great. And I also saw that there was the WMO IOC joint collaboration board or yeah, that piece of it. There's new leadership at WMO there's new leadership at IOC they're all interested in more collaborations between the two and the WMO has that early warnings for all program that they're trying to implement by 2027. And there's a lot of nice requirements in there that include the ocean. And so I'm just interested in the collaborations that you've seen with the WMO, maybe at the meeting at IOC and what we might do in the future. Yeah, thank you Scott. We were just talking about this with the team, the tsunami team yesterday at NOAA. We are kind of waiting to hear more about what the JCB will do I think it is a little quiet for us right now. I did get a chance to talk to some of the WMO folks that come to the IOC meetings when we were there in June. We are hearing more about ocean related requirements which is great. Probably the next step will be to figure out what this new no longer the JCOM now the JCB is going to be what how it's going to function there seems to be some ambiguity around that. And so we'll just be working with our WMO team to figure out how we can kind of get in there and start the conversation without precluding allowing others to start as well. Some of the tropical cyclone work that we've been doing in the United States is of high interest. Expanding that globally to the WMO so I look forward to working with you on that. Thank you. Tony. Yeah, thank you Nicole and it's great that you're back at the table and congratulations. I might have more directly related to the National Committee work and try to how do we continue to work on you. We've had good contact with Liz and others and active but I feel like there's a new opportunity now with you active and IOC and I just how do we that there's two questions that have come up in the committee. And I think we're going to be talking about with some of our nexus organizations is how you know for for the US scientists and for the US public who really isn't going to follow all of this. How do we really elevate what we try to do through essentially our our ocean shots effort to elevate aspirations around ocean science. But also how do we engage a little bit more directly with some of your interagency federal process the sauce to you know other activities so how can we as a national committee. Sort of elevate and work with you to kind of elevate some of these issues and particularly kind of leading into maybe the meeting in Barcelona or any other specific opportunities that you see for us to work more with you to amplify what you're doing. Yeah, thank you Tony and I. I think having a deadline like that of sorts the meeting of Barcelona might not be a bad idea. Because this is a, this is an issue that we've been talking about and talking about. There are multiple interagency bodies, this committee and others. And none of them have the great links to one another. We also anticipate that the US State Department will want to potentially re stand up its UNESCO national committee and that there might be something for the IOC underneath that. So what we've been trying to talk about on the IOC interagency team is what would be a better approach what could we propose to link the sauce to link this committee to link whatever might be stood up under the UNESCO. It's, it's really hard to say there's, I don't think there's one answer to be honest with you because I've been asked several times what is your recommendation. I think that these various bodies could make multiple choices and succeed. But I think we need to sit down and talk about it together and be deliberate about those choices, so that we're not creating another body that doesn't connect with the existing bodies, So I suspect and it's not a bad news on its face. If the State Department says let's stand back up your IOC body under UNESCO right that's not a bad thing, but it makes me kind of go body. So I think it would be worthwhile and I'm, you know, talk to the team about it many times and we're all kind of like, I don't know a lot of different things could work. I think maybe having a deadline for ourselves of having some ideas solidified by that Barcelona meeting is, is something that we can shoot for and should shoot for internal to the IWG to even, even within the smaller team. I think there's maybe the UNESCO meeting that happens in November, I think might be a sort of a little bit of a point of entry for us to focus but also I just want to my understanding of the national decade committee is also to again to really help bring these issues out into the the academic community and also the public a little bit more so let's give some thought to that very specific mission that we have because again, it's fine for us to come to these meetings but but really sort of really elevate this without those communities is something that we have on our list to do as well. No and I appreciate that. This was a bit of a personal anecdote this was the first delegation I ever led that I had never sat on before. So it was a bit of a, what do I do, even though I had been on many international US delegations to international treaties and such. And one of my very first questions was what are we doing to make sure that we are representing fully, not just the other US agencies, which we have a pipeline to but also other members of the US Ocean community. And I think there's a lot of good intentions there I can't imagine how difficult it's been with the stop and the start with UNESCO and so I've been asking myself what is different and more durable. And I'm sure the State Department is going to say you could just stand up a new IOC committee under the UNESCO and that is not bad news inherently. But I think part of where I get a little mixed up is, is that the way to go, because it up and down and up anyway, that's a lot of words we've been giving it a lot of words on the IWG. And that has a great one answer. That's the way to do it. But I would, I think we have to naturally engage this body in that conversation. And I'm just going to give myself the deadline of the Barcelona meeting for us to have at least a couple of solid ideas on the table because Yeah, you bet. Okay, we're going to take one more question and because we're already over time. So, Frank Miller-Karger. Welcome Frank. Yeah, hello everybody. Good to see you all. I wanted to follow up on Tony's question and Nicole's presentation and I welcome Nicole's emphasis on having some, some goalposts for the April meeting in Barcelona. I'm going to bring it up during my presentation and one opportunity maybe this Vision 2030 process of the ocean decade has stood up and several of us in the US are involved in the Vision 2030 process. One of the things that we would like to hear from you and we need some help with is in developing these goalposts and indicators on how the decade is progressing and I think that's the weakest part of all of these writing teams. We're all writing white papers that have to be delivered by the Barcelona meeting so that that's one ask that I have of Nicole and group as we point to Barcelona. The other one is building on Scott's comment. And I really was very interested in the dynamic between WMO and the IOC because in addition to those those groups and efforts that I just mentioned there's another one that is coming up and that's the global greenhouse gas watch GGGW, which is still in a study group at the WMO it's led by WMO but it includes the IOC. And it's an important opportunity there to get the ocean engaged in an operational way in greenhouse gas monitoring and the GGGW goes beyond just measuring things in the air but trying to understand and predict fluxes and so for that you need basic chemistry biology and geology all together and so I would this is a heads up this is heating up and the implementation plan is being written. Thank you Frank. Okay, well thank you again, Nicole I hope you have some time maybe to stay with us for a little while. Great. That's terrific. So I want to move on now to the next part of our agenda, which is to talk about our nexus organizations and as everyone in this room is aware when we first stood up the US National Committee. The great part of our mandate was to reach out to the US ocean community more broadly, and one of the mechanisms that we identified was to create what we call the ocean decade nexus and encouraged ocean organizations to sign up on our website. We have all of those nexus organizations on the website and then to participate in the, in the community's activities. And so, one of the things that we've been talking about quite a lot is how to engage our nexus more effectively and to make use of this network. We certainly have a newsletter that we send out to the nexus we encourage them to send items to us to post their events on our, in our calendar, but we think there may be some more opportunities out there. And so this next session is really designed to help us identify some of those opportunities. The other goal for the US National Committee today is to really say, you know, what, where are we going with the decade and what does success look like. Identify any wins that we have today. And then also to say, are there opportunities out there that we should really recognize now and start acting on to make a difference during the decade. So, I want everybody to kind of have that in the back of their mind as we go through the next couple of sessions. And the only other thing I'll mention, since it came up, we've been talking quite a bit about the Barcelona meeting. And I encourage people to stay after the last talk today, because we will have some time to then talk about, you know, do some real on the ground planning for the Barcelona meeting. Okay. So now I'd like to turn it back to Frank, actually, I think you're the first up. And I don't know if is Gabriella with us. She's. Yes. Oh, great. So, you're up on our next on our agenda so you can take it away. Great, thank you. I assume I can share my screen. And let me know if you can see that please. It's, well, it hasn't come up yet. Is it? Okay, there we go. Now it's in the room. Good to go, Frank. Great. So this is one of the ocean shots that we wrote early on and actually that also was endorsed as an ocean decade program, which is one of those overarching long term umbrellas for many different projects and activities under the ocean decade. So I'll give you a very, very short overview and why we need this and then some of the suggestions that I have for how the US can be more involved. So I think that it's no secret that life is at the core of everything that we do, even though we don't think about it sometimes in different disciplines. But when we look at the essential ocean variables, many of them are needed to monitor and restoration or some type of recovery or management of marine life or or ecosystems for managing or understanding green greenhouse fluxes or food and nutrition production, water quality or and so many other social relevant processes and ocean uses and here's just an example illustrated us as we think about how do you recover or restore an ecosystem and we want to monitor success. There's now many tools that we can use to to address that as opposed to not looking or or having some control environment. So if we can think of EDNA or acoustics imaging satellite remote sensing, and so on, we can get a good picture of how things are are restoring or not. So, but we've known about how we've known that we need to incorporate biological observing into general ocean observing for decades. And the thing is that it we've tried to do this in little bits and pieces. The global ocean observing system recognize this and has had it in its plan, all the way, all the way back when it was adopted by the IOC as as goose in 1991. The census of marine life made a big dent in this and really moved things forward, but then it closed after a decade in 2010. And those pieces were picked up by in the international community by the by the group on Earth observations by diversity and we established the marine biodiversity observation network under that and several US agencies under the National Ocean Partnership Program sponsored projects and pilots that still continue today there's 10 pilots in the US that belong or follow the guidelines or build guidelines for and one and one is also a tight partnership between the global ocean observing system, the ocean biodiversity information system and trying to move data so one of the big things is interoperability and trying to move data from the lab into into the public. And these partners and a bunch of other partners about 60 groups got together and proposed marine life 2030 to the ocean decade back in 2020 and it was endorsed by the ocean decade and 2021. And it's a collaboration between the ocean by by a molecular observation network or the oars which looks at ocean acidification and many other programs including Oasis which I think is represented in the room today. But if we look at life and how in the measurements of life and the seed today it still looks like this. And this is after 100 some years of records being included in the ocean biodiversity of information system Oasis. The it's very hard to track change and it's very hard to do that everywhere in a in a sustained manner and yet we want to make decisions about life and forecast life in a way that is responsive to management needs and including greenhouse gas management so with a picture like this, how do we change the the panorama. Today we can include biodiversity and other biological measurements in ocean observing if we put our head to it, for example, we can include there's many devices now that that do optics of imaging for from bacteria and in other micro organisms to zooplankton and fish we can do animal tracking, we can do acoustics both passive and active the genomics areas exploding with the DNA. There's many different platforms that we can use some of them are autonomous models and forecasting are starting to be very good in biology, including in species distribution but also in biodiversity and one area that we have a lot to gain with is an AI and visualization of data. So one of the questions is how can the National Ocean Decade Committee help define the vision for how we move data across this value chain and integrate biology into ocean observing so defining the requirements and working with goose and then in the integrated ocean observing system in the US is the US part of goose so can we work through that channel. Can we develop better observing strategies and integrating instruments into these platforms. And we have a better way to, and I think that this this is one of the big challenges in in our society is moving data and information, so that we can make decisions and enable this blue economy that we talk about which is based on information, and so much biological data is not moving and has never moved and this is something that I think we can address. And then having synthesis and modeling and connecting the user back to the requirements to an operational loop is very important so we cannot build an operating system an operational system on the research programs that we have right now. It has to be operational, and it has to involve the stakeholders so at present, these steps that you see here are not coordinated the there's really no convention on standards. For the community, there's no coordinate coordination on capacity, development and sharing for data management, especially, and the user is not really in the loop, and so there's there's many things that we can do. The ocean decade has initiated the ocean vision 2030 process that we talked about recently there's 10 working groups, one per challenge and I'm not going to go through the challenges here they're easy to find. These, these groups are supposed to write white papers that are going to be discussed and sort of set the tone for the conference in Barcelona the whole conference is built around these white papers. And there's many US scientists involved in the ocean decade and in writing these white papers here's some listed in the different working groups. Three of the working groups have co chairs that come from the US and I think that there's an opportunity here to engage with the national decade committee. There's a timeline I'm not I'm not going to show it but there is a possible a possibility being discussed of the working groups meeting with the ocean decade and New Orleans at the Ocean Sciences meeting that's not decided yet. But the ocean decade coordinating unit is discussing that so the white papers have to have to be basically done by January and polished by April. So the conversation topics that I bring here is that the ocean decade is about sustainable development and how you engage scientists and making this happen. And what I would like to see this national committee engaged in is helping the US play a play a more prominent role in leading the ocean decade programs right now. The US is sort of invisible in the in the international ocean decade. So I think that we can change that without too much effort. Linking stakeholders with the science groups that are involved in the ocean decade is one thing emphasizing science diplomacy is another area where the US can really shine and be involved in. I think one of the main things that we can help with is in coordinating education and capacity sharing or capacity building. Right now, all of these groups that all of us that teach or educate and ocean sciences do it on our own. There's really no coordination on curricula, especially on how you move data and data standards and interoperability. This is a huge opportunity for the decade and I think we should take advantage of that opportunity. The US can participate more actively in the ocean decade ocean vision 2030 process and I mentioned before setting indicators and milestones and how we how we achieve these milestones in the next six years. And then look beyond 2030 so looking at the ocean decade as a ramp to take off for sustainable development into the future is is where we need support. The, the UN decade, the US National Committee can also help peer review of these programs and programs that the ocean decade has a rolling a rolling process to solicit for and we are asked as programs and projects to peer review this there's no formal process established there and this is something that the academies has experience with and all of you and national agencies have great experience with so we can support that that peer review process. And there's also ultimately what we all ask for is the support of endorsed actions actions endorsed by the UN decade are all volunteer there's no support so far for any of these. It's three years have gone by almost completely now. And all of this is. And this is where we are now we have an opportunity that if we don't pay attention will be missed. One way to do this and I think that Nicole being now representing us at the IOC is a very important thing to get us back in the game is working with a you IOC and other UN focal points to advance ocean science for sustainable development. I think that we don't even the IOC doesn't make enough use of linking with the for example the global ocean observing system and focal points in making this happen so I think that we should get a mandate from the focal points to do ocean observing. So the decade is an opportunity. We should take advantage of it. If we don't pay attention, it will be gone in a blink, just like many, many other UN decades. So these are our contacts Gabriel Kanonik on myself, our colleagues of marine life 2030 and sort of what I talked about is what our focus is. Thank you. Thank you, Frank. And we'll take maybe one question out. We're running a little behind schedule so if anyone wants to follow up with Frank. Lynn. Yeah, I can't talk in this. Thank you so much. I think you've articulated in a very common diplomatic way concerns I've had about our directions and engagement with UN decade process and I think it is high time we really focus on this. We really appreciate your inclusion of the global ocean observing system is part of the process going forward. Not everything has to be absolutely novel, which has been kind of the focus for several years. And so anyway, I just wanted to say appreciate your talk and I hope that the we can move forward this way. We're going to have to move on. The next on our list is Oasis and that's Masha Edmonton and Masha, do you have slides to present. I can present them myself or. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, we'll make sure you can share. So thank you to the Ocean Studies Board and National Committee for inviting Oasis to speak today. My name is Masha Edmonton. I'm from the Center for Ocean Leadership at UCAR that provides programmatic support for the UN Ocean Decade Program observing air sea interaction strategy, otherwise known as Oasis. This is co-leg by Megan Cronin, Christa Miranda and Seb Swart who could not be here today due to a European holiday and also a sabbatical field research crew. So we're very busy over here. So the Oasis aims to quantify ocean atmosphere flexes, including ocean uptake of CO2 as called for by the Paris Agreement. The Oasis influences weather and climate through fluxes or heat, moisture, momentum, particles and gases, and without this air sea fluxes, the ocean would be pretty static. So Oasis aims to improve the coupling between the ocean and atmosphere and earth system models and thereby the information forecast from these models. So through these ocean oceanic and atmospheric observations, we can improve forecast and weather climate and the ecosystem. So this is the Ocean 19, Ocean Ops 19 conference, the first grand idea for Oasis with form, which is that we need a globally distributed network of air sea observing platforms built around an expanded array of time series stations. In our Oasis community forms, we identified consensus that we need to grand idea number two, optimize satellites for air sea fluxes and ensure that we're improving boundary layer observing and grand idea number three, we need to improve understanding of air sea interaction processes and improve the air sea coupling models. So these are the three pillars that underpin the objectives for this decade program. And this is driven by the community based off those Ocean Ops 19 white papers that are listed on the screen in the triangle. So the vision is to improve in situ satellite data and models, which will then lead to improve ocean information and earth system forecast, serving stakeholders around the world and help contribute to UN decade goals. So Oasis is driven by this theory of change, where we need to work together across disciplines and across the world, including the global south and big ocean states. We intend to do this by developing a culture of partnerships and mentorship. So to dive into how we are addressing these grand ideas. The first is expanding the observation network. It's focused on building global capacity through curriculum development, data sharing webinars summer schools and mentoring. And these quotes on the slide showcase our eco leadership within the Oasis community driving these ideas. We're also trying to address current gaps and air sea observations and notably will have a large presence at the upcoming ocean science meeting in 2024 and would love to invite you to our town halls that will dive into emerging opportunities for air sea flexes from space. We are also utilizing the Oasis community to develop findable interoperable reasonable data models and products to create a predictable ocean, as well as create endorsed community best practices by bringing air sea interaction practitioners from around the world and provide open access resources to the community on best practices. So some accomplishments of Oasis today are community webinars. We host several webinars to engage and educate the community such as uncrewed surface vehicles for goose or the global ocean observing system. The UN ocean decade satellite events, air sea flexes best practices capacity building and other workshops. We provide education to the younger generation through the so last summer school curriculum where members from our community will come and help build a curriculum for the summer school course as well as come and teach lessons and teach activities. We also have community based publications on air sea interactions, which includes publications on our website at airseaops.org. And we also can be seen at multiple conferences with presentations at so last AGU your see the ocean science meeting, the UN Ocean Conference, ams and others. And lastly, Oasis engaged in community collaboration through our team teams, and their focus on best practices and interoperability fair data and models observing network design and model improvements partnerships and capacity and international efforts. We have a lot of hope and appreciation for seeing the full value chain of air sea interaction research and the UN decade endorsement has definitely provided some connective tissue and some leverage for us. So it's helped international collaborations. It's helped with cross discipline research, allowing us to connect with energy water carbon life cycles and earth system modeling, as well as make connections between a situ observations and data lights models and forecast, and also helping this theory of change make a cultural shift. There are four key areas where Oasis is looking for support. The ocean decade is a bottom up science process at the moment. So we could use the National Committee's help with getting funding to support workshops websites, e-cops other efforts, and we could also use some top town guidance associated with this potential funding to keep us focused. We could also encourage the National Committee to work with the decade office just streamlined the reporting process, which I know most people are aware of is pretty onerous and time consuming. So a little more guidance on that would be great. The National Committee could also issue some best practices on how to engage with the DCC and DCOs, which are the decade collaborative centers and decade coordination offices to help with programs. I don't remember them both from the ocean ops community, but it's still kind of unclear their support role with our program, how often we should be engaging with them, how often we should be reaching out. And lastly, the National Committee could request more detailed information regarding the projects associated with these programs. There are requirements and opportunities that we are just unaware of at the moment, and we'd love to engage better with projects joining our program. So if you'd like to join our community, you can visit our website here and stay apprised of all that we're doing. And thank you again to the Ocean Study Board and the National Committee for inviting us to speak today. I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you very much, Masha. First off, I'll say, you know, if anybody has a question, please raise your hand. And let's see Rosie, go ahead Rosie. I think you're on mute. Okay, can you hear me now? Or no. Okay. So your presentation was really great in emphasizing operationalization of fair principles. Can you speak to how you're working towards operationalizing care principles for indigenous data sovereignty? Yeah, so at the moment, I'm in a current restructuring of our organization. So we're having a meeting right before the Ocean Science meeting where we're meeting with the community and bringing them to New Orleans. So that way we can better like engage in everything else that we need to talk on and care principles is definitely one that we want to add to our fair principles theme team. Not in the works at the moment, but we're planning on doing that starting in December. Great. Thanks. Thank you, Masha. And I'll just make one comment is that for the US National Committee, we can certainly share concerns with the Decade Coordination Unit about the reporting, but we don't make decisions on the reporting process. Yeah. So if you had maybe even if you, you know, probably the more specific the recommendation was on the reporting, the more effective that communication will be. Okay. And our next speaker is Pat Glibert. She's the current president of ASLO. And Pat, are you ready? I am. And I sent you some slides. Yes, indeed. So I'm Pat Glibert, professor with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, but I'm here today as the president of ASLO, the Association for the Sciences of Lomology and Oceanography. And I'm here just to introduce you to our mission as low fosters a diverse international scientific community that creates integrates and communicates knowledge across the full spectrum of aquatic sciences, advances public awareness and education about aquatic resources and research, and promote scientific stewardship of aquatic resources for the public interest. So we're a society of about 3,500 members and more than 50% of our membership is international. So we are no longer the American Society of Lomology and Oceanography. And 30% of our members identifies early career and another 30% as students. So we have quite an engaged membership, international membership and young and upcoming membership. Next slide please. I think you're all well aware of what ASLO does in the realm of conferences. We already referenced to the Ocean Sciences meeting coming up in February. This is an endorsed decade action program. It is co-sponsored by AGU and the Oceanography Society. And there will be several sessions and workshops, etc. With regard to the ocean decade. The following conference is going to be in June in Madison, and that will be an as low only conference. But we fully embrace at all aspects of our conferences, partnerships and basic and applied science while making scientific and social connections. Next slide. We're all well aware of our great journals. L&O, L&O letters, which is our journal for shorter communications, L&O methods, and our bulletin. We are working, and we are on track for having these journals fully open access within a little over a year. This transition is ongoing. And that's our timeline. I just wanted to point out a couple of recent special issues or virtual issues that have relevance to some of the things we've already talked about today. And L&O special issue on autonomous instrumentation and big data. And a L&O methods virtual issue on machine and deep learning. So our special issues in addition to all of our regular contributed papers really help to highlight a lot of these issues. Next, next slide. I wanted to also make you aware of some of the programs that are perhaps not as front and center in your mind when you think of as low. And what is a program that we've been offering now for the past couple of years, which is our near monthly webinar series called Amplifying Voices. And this webinar series is designed to showcase the work of early career researchers around the world, particularly in places where they would not ordinarily have the finances to attend a regular conference. So we've had many fabulous presentations from India, Singapore, Morocco, South Africa, Brazil, Columbia. You name it. And these are really wonderful presentations and wonderful opportunities to showcase the work of these great early career researchers. We take pride in expanding opportunities for our students and early career researchers and I'm only going to highlight two programs here. One is the as low multicultural program, which has been running since 1990. And now has supported more than 1400 students from over 250 different institutions. It originally was turned the as low minority program. It's now the multicultural program this past June for our meeting in Mallorca. We brought 100 students. And they were fully paid for and fully engaged in the meeting. This program is run in collaboration with Hampton University. Another program that we have developed recently. This comes out of the fact of life that publication is expensive and publication is going to continue to be expensive, especially as we transition to open access research or publications. And this is our early career publication honor. We can offer a waiver of publication fees for open access for those. It is an application from those from the global south Ukraine or other underrepresented groups. And we can offer a select number of these publication waivers. Students and early career professionals receive not only a waiver of publication fees, but manuscript guidance along the process. So, we hope that we will be able to expand this in the years to come. Next. Another program that as low runs and has run for more than a decade and yet is probably not well known to many is our global outreach and education program. In this program, we offer small grants on the order of $2 to $3,000 for projects to communicate aquatic science to non-technical audiences. And we've just selected the five projects that will receive funding for this year. And you can see the titles here, but importantly, we're supporting programs in Northern Mariana Islands, Mexico, Nepal, Ghana and Nigeria. And the map shows where projects have been funded in our previous years. We run this program. At this time, every other year. So, next slide. So, what does success look like return to our as low mission, which is for the creation integration and communication of knowledge across the full spectrum of aquatic sciences advancement in public awareness and education about aquatic resources and research and promotion of scientific steward stewardship for the public interest. So, thank you very much. Thank you, Pat. Do you have time to take a question or two? Sure. Okay. Does anyone looking for any hands. Okay. Well, I'll ask. I'll ask a favor, perhaps. One of the things of course, as the US national committee is really, really want to be able to engage the community. And so I'm wondering if there are opportunities to work with as to get our message out about any decade opportunities to your community. Oh, I think that's, that's a wonderful. opportunity and we can continue to have that conversation with our communications director, but also opportunities to promote all of these activities through articles in our bulletin. And we can, we can work together with you to make that happen. That sounds great. I have one other. This is just a quick question and that is for these special issues. Are those open access. At the current time, the select papers are open access as the authors chose to do so. As I said, we're going to move forward in the future for all of our papers to be open access, but at the current time, we are running basically hybrid where authors can choose to pay the extra fee to have it open access or not. So, we can, we can look to see which papers are open or not. Okay, thank you very much. Let's see I don't see any hands up right now so maybe we'll move on and then we'll have some time maybe for discussion. So, David Miller. You're up next. You ready. Great. See the screen. Can you hear me okay. Yes. Yeah, so thanks very much for the opportunity to be here today and to present to this to this group. I'll be coming at this, I guess, from a little different perspective speaking as a company as opposed to a program. But our company is very, very active in the UN ocean decade of ocean science for sustainable development and wanted to share, firstly, some context on our motivation and also kind of the various activities that we were actively involved with. So, firstly, you may not be familiar with with Fugaro. I'm not sure who is, or is not, but we are a multinational corporation that is headquartered in the Netherlands. But we operate globally with offices in 60 countries, including the US where we have US businesses and approximately 1200 employees. We are a data company and we are providing these data to our clients, both private and public sectors to be risk and manage their infrastructure development and natural resource development programs. We're active in 3 main sectors. We're supporting the transition with regards to energy. We're involved with the development of sustainable infrastructure and we're active in climate change adaptation and mitigation. We're a purpose driven company. Our purpose is to help create a safe and livable world. The insights that we provide to our clients come from this triple a approach where we acquire data. We analyze data and provide advice to our clients on the data. Not just a data collector, but analytics as well as advice and insights. So the translation from data to information to knowledge. We have many resources and competencies, specialized platforms, expertise to support ocean science and we're conducting ocean science every day all over the world for our clients, like I say, both in the public and private sector. You can see some of those resources here, but they fully support obviously ocean observation as well as ocean mapping, including surface. Med ocean buoys ocean sea floor ocean landers. We have 27 specialized vessels. We have now a fleet of on crew growing fleet of on crewed surface vessels remotely operated vehicles and autonomous underwater vehicles. A lot of this now being enabled and managed through remote operation centers. A lot of words on this slide, but I think it's really important for you to see just how active a private sector company is in the ocean decade. We were involved in the very early days in the planning process so in the open consult of meetings that were held to help plan the decade. We were involved in many of these regional meetings and we're often the only if not one of the few private sector actors in the room. That has translated into active participation now in the implementation of the decade. We have a partnership with IOC UNESCO, and it's largely formed around transforming access to and sharing ocean data. And we're a data company. And we see great, great synergies in our support of the decade in the area of ocean data. We're a member of the Ocean Decade Alliance, which if you're familiar with that is by invitation only for those key contributors to the decade. So we are actually secunding personnel to IOC UNESCO in Paris with an in kind contribution. And that that seconded person is leading to working groups under the Ocean Decade. One is the Ocean Decade data coordination group. You may have seen a data and information strategy that was produced by the decade in June that was produced by this working group. And then the other is the Ocean Decade corporate data group, which is a group of private companies that have come together to create frameworks and mechanisms to provide public access to private data. Our CEO co-chairs that corporate data group with the IOC executive secretary. We've appointed members a member to the data coordination group. We have an appointed member to the data strategy implementation group. We've appointed member on working group eight of the Ocean Decade vision 2030 initiative that Frank mentioned. Appointed member to the African and the Jason Island States Ocean Decade task force with produced the Africa roadmap that Nicole mentioned. Appointed member to the 2024 Ocean Decade program committee. We're actively involved with three endorsed programs of the Ocean Decade. And that's growing, but the the CBED 2030 project Ditto digital twin of the ocean and coast predict we're active in all of those programs. We've also leading a consortium for a digital twin early warning system that was accepted as an official officially endorsed project of the Ocean Decade in the fourth call. We also have employees that are active in eCops and we've actually initiated an eCops group within Fugro globally. So, you've seen that we're a data company you've seen our all in approach here on the decade. I think from a private sector perspective, the private sector is not always visible in the decade but important collaborator and partner. So, you know, the motivation here information as a currency of progress, supporting sustainable development, as well as driving innovation. So these are kind of I would say umbrella motivations from a private sector perspective. Looking more specifically at Fugro. And the direct and indirect benefits of our participation we obviously see business opportunities. The hope and expectation is this will create this you and decade will create a create awareness and prioritize funding to further expand ocean science and the private sector can be a partner in that process. It improves access for ocean science data we use public source data every day in our business. Improving the density, the resolution and the coverage of that will only enhance the services that we we provide. Engagement it allows us to have very thoughtful conversations and engagement with our employees, our suppliers, our clients and our shareholders. We are a publicly traded company. It supports our sustainability agenda, we have sustainability program in the company and this is a key pillar of that sustainability program. ESG reporting is becoming increasingly important, particularly in Europe where it's kind of leading the charge. There's also potential tax benefits here for participation this hasn't been our motivation we have not exercised this yet but it is potentially a motivation. And then reputation benefits I think for us it's very important to be living and supporting our our purpose of helping to create a safe and livable world and we're doing that through our support of the decade. So aspirations for the ocean decade. These are from our perspective and maybe a private sector perspective which could admittedly be quite different than than others. But we see the ocean decade will have raised awareness of the critical importance of ocean health sustainability and prosperity of the planet and significantly increased funding of ocean science to reverse the cycle of decline in ocean health and support the development of sustainable ocean economy. Have the private sector seen as a meaningful partner and collaborator in this endeavor whose resources competencies and expertise are truly appreciated and who is involved in the co design co development of impactful solutions that leverage public private and public private academic partnerships. And the private sector is at the table with governments NGOs and the finance investment community to ensure that ocean data information and knowledge is available to sufficiently de risk and stimulate investment in the ocean and ocean science and technology. So, that's my presentation, hopefully. Yeah, I'm available for questions. Yeah. Heather, I see you've got your hand up. Go ahead. Yeah. So you mentioned why you're involved and I'm interested in if you could say a little bit more about the initial involvement with the decade about how you actually started to get involved in the first place. It's a long story it's a long windy story that actually starts with Craig McLean around seabed 2030. We had conversations at the forum for future ocean floor mapping in Monaco in 2016, which was the precipitation of seabed 2030. And we saw an opportunity for Fugaro participation. This was actually a fill in a filled thropic sense. We saw that we had chips moving around the world. We could be contributing data to that program through simply logging data during those transits. It started simply there with one ship in the Americas in the US. That grew. We've now got nine vessels involved we've contributed 2.6 million square kilometers of the symmetry to see the 2030. But that action saw demonstrated leadership when the ocean decade was then starting to organize. They leaned on us for for demonstrating similar leadership and bringing our perspective to the to the table. And that led to wanting to scale up not just Fugaro participation but other industry actors. And that led to our partnership with IOC and the formation of the decade quarter coordination group where we have now very serious multinational companies at the table working with us to get public access to private private data. So that was your question but that's that's it was it was not necessarily by design seven years ago it was a path that we created through conversations and participation. Okay, I'm sorry I won't be able to take more questions right now because we're behind schedule, but certainly you can use the chat, perhaps to pose your questions and maybe our speakers or have a chance to get back to you. I have Heather Spence and she's going to talk about the ocean memory project. Thanks and thanks for inviting the ocean memory project to be part of this. I guess I could say now for something a little different. Hello, I get I'm Heather Spence I co lead the ocean memory project, along with Jodi Deming who is a member of the National Academy and Daniel cone, who is a visual artist. I myself am a marine biologist, many of you already know me through my work in the interagency space. I'm quite aware a number of fats, including I co chair the interagency working group on ocean sound and marine life. And through that, I'm quite involved in ocean decade space with our endorsed program on the bear time acoustic environment. And part of why I asked my question is I think one thing I think is important to remember is that the, I think the ocean decade can be a little bit confusing for those who are outside of the loop. And so, one of the reasons why ocean memory project has been able to participate in this process is because I'm able to help demystify that. And I think that's one of the points that I want to make is I think it's really important to think about who the players are in this space and think how do we reach the people who aren't really sure how to get involved what it even means to get involved. So, with that, I'll give a little bit of information about what is the ocean memory project so this was actually born at a national academies event. So I'm curious, who here is familiar with the 15 year experiment that was the National Science Keck Futures initiative. Okay, so, so a few but this was a really cool, successful experiment, basically working to promote transdisciplinary collaboration in the sciences and towards the end of the 15 years. And also brought in disciplines outside of the sciences and the arts and humanities. And, oh, thanks. So, and so each year there was a different theme in 2016. There was there was a theme, the deep blue sea. And there was a conference and a resulting. And after the conference there was funding available for projects coming out of that at the conference, which was not your average science conference. It was very collaborative and hands on the this idea emerged of does the ocean have memory. It was a very provocative question, and scientists got excited about it. Artists got excited about it. All these interesting dialogues came out of just that seemingly simple question but when you put together that idea of ocean and memory, you really start to imagine a lot of interesting things that you could explore with that and so all projects got funded in the ocean memory space and then in the final year of NACP there was a challenge grant that anyone from any of the years was could could apply to be that and the ocean memory project was thrilled to be funded as one of only three projects that were funded in that challenge grant. So that's the origin, but what do we do since then well, we've really been forming a community. And when people ask me well what is, what is ocean memory what is the ocean memory project. I could define for you ocean memory and a number of different ways I can say well we are exploring ocean memory as thinking about it as a concept of how memories can be stored in the ocean not just in biotic resources but also can memories be stored in in a parcel of water. How are these memories recall can be recalled. How does this relate to ocean sustainability, but I think the really at the heart of it is ocean memory project is a community of people who have very different perspectives on this topic, all working together, quite successfully and integratively. It's not just a project where we're taking science and art and jamming them together by saying, Okay, science has finished. Let's tell an artist about this science, and the artist is going to create some art about it and help make the public more aware about this issue. That's a very fine thing to do. But an ocean memory project. It's actually about having everybody come together at the process stage. So, it's, it's really creating projects where everyone is involved in the creation of that project and the methodology of that project and how is that going to get. How's that going to come to fruition. So, and we've had a lot of different events conferences workshops, discussion groups, both in person and we had to adapt, as we all did during the pandemic to having things fully online. And we also have given out seed grants to many different projects to work on this topic. So we've one of the things we're working on now is developing basically writing out and publishing methodologies that we've developed for how to do this kind of transdisciplinary planning for events discussions publications granting. And so that's something where I think maybe ocean memory project could be engaged more in the ocean decade to see how can we really expand who can be part of this conversation. Because I think some of the methods that we've created, could really help us do that. I'll say to the group started in the US but we have international participation. And actually, you mentioned the, the, the IO Caribbean region, you know, I saw that only had seven endorsed projects would sort of surprise me and one of those projects is actually involved with ocean memory project. And it was partially through their involvement in the project that they were able to figure out how to get endorsement for for that to the UN. You know, it's, it's, it's quite a bit of effort to to be part of the decade and so I would like to see are there ways that we can make demystify the process and get some more people involved and is there a role for ocean memory project to help us do that help us to additional communities, help us think about engaging a variety of disciplines, maybe in some new ways. And, and I mean, there's more than I could say but I think that's, I'd love to hear if anybody has any questions so I want to I'll stop there and I'll say that we do have a website, it's ocean memory project.org. So if you want to check out more about what we're doing or getting touch. You can check us out there. Thank you so much, Heather. Do we have maybe one or two questions for Heather. Anyone. Well, I know I will say at least for, for the US National Committee, we will certainly take you up on your offer for reaching out to the community and enhancing engagement, I can see. It's a really important part of the role of the US National Committee so I see some opportunities there. Thanks, Liz. Good to see you Heather. Likewise. Just wanted to note that, you know, as an interagency working group, as we even recruit within the federal eight and within an across federal agencies for ocean decade actions because we want to show up to this party. We invited everybody to and I don't mean by the United States alone, but indeed we were part of the, the folks who came up with this brainchild right and so it's important for us to not only be there but be effective in this space. And I think we've struggled sometimes with making sure folks understand that even though the big pot of money has not yet appeared for ocean decade endorse things, it's still important to seek endorsement. And I think some of the things that you described that ocean memory project has experienced some of the things that David mentioned relative to like the benefits companies can experience out of being involved in something like an ocean decade. I think it's crucial to do and so if there's a way perhaps that our interagency team can work with the national committee and your group in particular to rethink how we demystify things, how we make the case that this is indeed important and necessary. And useful. I'm looking forward to talking to you more about how maybe we can do that. So thank you. Yeah, thanks. These are all great. And if people are tracking the chat. It's incredibly robust and really underscores to me, the fact that we're not having these discussions on a consistent basis, ongoing, because I feel like, you know, the connections are being made, literally in this sort of informal for as a result of this so that's just one thing I want to observe and so I do think I want to think about that the other thing is I'm just really, you know, putting it on the table that as the national decade committee. We're trying to figure out, not all of the eaches but really how we can really more effectively make these types of connections in a sustained way with some sustained outcomes so again very supportive of Liz's idea that seek endorsement. But that's this thing that's happening out there in the international world and I'm getting announcements from the I use national for the international committee about things and I'm like well I don't know that was even going on so so so I do think endorsements I don't want to do that but again we're the national committee. We are really thinking about us leadership in this regard, not only as a participant in the decade, which is through some of their official nodes, but also leveraging those official decades to be sure that we at the US, but through our academic partners are leading and we are connecting and also maybe sending a message, which is what you get get recognized. But outside the decade, if you're not recognized and I feel like as a national committee maybe that's a bit of a focus that we might think about like as those doing x y z they don't have to be a recognized committee to be able to make feel like they're contributing to the US and the national commitment to that so again I just put that challenge out there so I am kind of asking us as a committee to think but also you all who contributed these great discussions. So what as a national committee, you know how we do that, you know, Dave the works that you're doing I'm kind of familiar with it I kind of probably tracking more than other people but but then so what is the US as the national decade committee can we even downsize some of your efforts or really make sure we're nesting what you're doing, you know even domestically in some other ways into these these international commitments so and just a thought that I think that gets back to the interaction where we discussed started with Nicole which is how do we then work more with the interagency committees I'm looking at four other interagency sauce committees that have been in the chat. Right, that I'm like one on acoustics and there's one on this and so yeah I feel like there's been something missed there for us a little bit. Again, it just maybe us not being aware but but I do feel like this is for me a loop back to really sort of we as a reconfirming our mission reconfirming our value added to this this enterprise which is doing lots of fantastic things, but it's still a bit. Not, not specific enough in my mind to say what what what do I want to take away from this and do next as a committee member, but just some thoughts. I think at this time if you know we can open up the discussion so not speaker specific but more open in terms of, you know, both how the community. The community can work with the US National Committee and vice versa what can then US National Committee do, and I guess one one thought that I had, you know hearing some of your, your presentations was to think about if you have a win, you know something where you really see you know some things accomplished for the decade, you can share that with us and we can feature it, but then our newsletter and on our website. So we would certainly love to get that kind of feedback from the community and and from our nexus organizations. Okay. Thank you Sue and thanks to each of the presenters, Nicole congratulations on on the seat that you now have. And David, thank you for being a leader and for food grow being a leader. And I have to say as a, not an observer but also a collaborative participant at the time. And for those of you don't know I'm retired now so I'm personally speaking for myself although for the record I do have an engagement with the Woods Hole Oceanographic institution, part time, because I am retired. I will say that food grow entered this not in, at least to my visibility, not as a speculative business opportunity but as a motivated conscious and conscience bearing commercial enterprise, but not not just for profit and for business opportunities Food grow is doing today, what us federal agencies don't do, which is run their acoustic data acquisition devices during transits. And so for commercial company to have the vision and wisdom to go ahead and do this and yet we're not fully compliant on the federal side. I think there's a wake up call amongst various federal agencies here so so that's point one let's follow But number two let's better figure out and Tony for the for the committee. There are legislated instruments like the National Ocean Partnership Program, which has not fully utilized in implementation, the invitation for the commercial sector to come in and be a welcomed partner rather than to have to fight their way into what has been the too often practiced norm of put out a BAA broad agency announcement, send me your pre proposal, send me a proposal we do an NSF styled review as opposed to just finding the collaborations immediately and go into work. And the law allows that. So the question is why aren't we implementing that. I think the answer to that is if we go back to the sauce then I'll take blame for that because I was a sauce to co chair. I was a sauce to members on the phone too. So I'll take the responsibility and not shed it to anyone else. But the sastres is is borderline feckless. When it comes down to implementing. I'm sorry. We're tired now so I, where it's like feckless or jumping into your. Tony when I was active you know I didn't bite my tongue either so, but, but nonetheless, we, we, and the reason it is, is because no one's in charge at the sauce. We have four co chairs God bless them the most patient people in the world, but none of them has the ultimate authority to move and compel the direction of priorities and spending. And until you get that we're going to continue to have the coalition of the willing sitting around. And once again, conjure. How could we do a B and C. So the problem is not with the sauce the problem is the way the sauce to set up that no one is in charge to compel particular direction you just have to recruit and incorporate the coalition of the willing. That's what to me makes it feckless it doesn't achieve anywhere near what it should and could do. But then the last thing, which would be what I'm hearing today from the report outs of several of the programs or projects is activities. But it's not clear towards what strategy, and I can't sell activities and ask for money to do more activities. I want more websites I want more e cops engagement I want more. I don't think so. That's not resonating with someone who's going to write a check for you, who's going to write the check, maybe the Congress, maybe the private sector, maybe philanthropy. But what I think we need to do and I would encourage the National Committee to be thinking along these lines is to characterize number one. How much money do we have to do what on each program and project, get an inventory and Liz maybe you you have this in development but how much money do we have in order to do a B C D and E. But I only have wide dollars and I need X dollars. Where's my gap. I think that's an important understanding in order to make the measure of how well is the United States doing in in taking a leadership role, taking a participatory role in the U. N. Decade. Frank's comment was was concerning but I know it's widely accepted amongst the members of some of the members of this committee that that the US is I think Frank I think you said us is invisible internationally. And we need to be putting money there so where do we get the money. The federal agencies. It's pretty hard to take it out of hide. But there are supplements that were passed through with the B I L and the IRA. And hopefully some of that can be materialized and applied I look forward to that and if there's an ability to give an accounting of that I think that would help. Dear federal agencies that would help this committee understand what that future looks like. But the other point is, is when you sell you got to sell to the Congress also, because the federal agencies if it's not in a president's budget, Congress isn't going to pick it up. So we need to be getting that in both sides. So I've thrown a lot of stuff up and out on the table but I think strategy is more important than activities that we could report on because that really isn't getting us closer to an understanding of how well we're doing with a decade. Last comment. Go back if you haven't looked at it. Look at the international ocean exploration decade. The international decade of ocean exploration is 50 years old. It started with an appropriation in the United States Congress. The IOC reps took it to the IOC and said hey, look what we're willing to start who's going to join us. Other countries came and joined. That's US leadership, but we're not there right now we know what's going on up the street and in Congress they're dealing with, with many distractions rather than the work for the people, but it, it's something that gave rise to many activities that continue today. I don't feel that you have to look at finishing something by the end of the decade. I think we'd be comfortable recognizing a three year budget planning process to start something within the decade and have it get legs and persist and carry on look at many oceanographic campaigns that do that. Thank you for your forbearance. I see. Sorry, Dipanya. Is that correct? How's his hand or her hand up? Yeah, it is Dipanjana Dipanjana. Thank you. Go ahead. Yeah, it's a my question is to. For I mean, how do you think this data acquisition system is making a difference in the blue. Could you state again who the your questions, your question and who it's directed towards? Yeah, I was thinking that I was listening about this different. I mean, thinking about them how the money can be get them for Mr. David Miller that how the blue economy. And the data acquisition can is making a difference in this. You're in the blue economy. Thanks for the question. I think there's a couple of layers there right and I'm not sure what you're referring to, but if from a data coordination group perspective right this is kind of creating the digital ecosystem for the decade this will be. Basically, the plumbing behind the scenes that will allow data to be discovered access and become interoperable. So you can imagine that that's a big challenge when you're talking about all of the ocean science data globally. There's many different types of ocean science data and it's all collated in various scales at various locations. I think there's over 3000 separate portals of ocean science globally so there's an effort now that's trying to interconnect. All of these systems so you have a system of systems and that will greatly enhance and improve anybody's ability to be able to go find data and access it and connect it to something else. Right so I think that's going to have tremendous power in terms of supporting the blue economy and then the new blue economy in terms of that data information and knowledge. If you're referring to the work of the corporate data group I would say these are early days we've we formed in February. We had our first in person meeting in Paris last week, but I see tremendous potential here I mean we have leading multinational corporations that are in the room. The challenge is not to convince them to share share data and make it publicly accessible challenges. How do you actually get permissions often from national governments to make those data available because most of the activity and most of the data is actually from within national waters and those operators have been given permission by the national government to conduct those activities. And it's not a given that those data can be freely made publicly accessible right so I can say that everyone in that room is actually on board in terms of sharing certain types of data at certain types of resolution and we're working. And that of course all of that comes from the blue economy I mean this work is happening every day there is data being collected every day in support of the blue economy. That data can become publicly accessible, but there's some challenges and obstacles. One of the most significant ones is national permission. Towards that. There's also a question of provenance of the data attribution of the data as the data is adjusted into a large system. A lot of it is funded by national agencies funding agencies groups collect it put it online put it out there. And in order for those groups to continue being successful and providing the data they their agency I'm thinking of say Noah NSF funded data collection fisheries and so forth needs to be a way to track how it's used to how much it's used. In order to provide, you know foundation for continuing the programs. They don't continue without showing success successful outcomes. So how has that done and very large data management. She's curious. I think it's done by still maintaining those separate systems right so you could you don't necessarily have to move the data into a larger ecosystem or or portal and lose some of the things you were doing before. It's about connecting that individual portal or system to others so that they can enter interconnect. So the architecture will allow that providence to be to be maintained. And metadata to be maintained. There are some guidelines around how how all of this should be structured so that this this broad much more broad system of systems will will ultimately evolve I don't know if that answers a question but it's it's not like it's all being thrown out and put into a new super system. It's actually all of the architecture that will allow all the bits and pieces to be be more effectively productive right. Okay, well thank you. I think it's time for us to move on and we have two more presentations and this time we're going to be talking about the decade coordination centers and there are two in North America. And so one is ocean visions, ocean climate solutions. And then the other one is the Northeast Pacific Ocean decade collaborative center. So, Leonardo, are you online and ready to go. I am online. Yes. Should I share the presentation or yes. Okay, if you're able to. Yes, let me attempt that. Can you see that. Yes, we can see it. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Well thank you for the opportunity to provide this update. So, I am feeling in today for our director Courtney McGeechy. She's on leave at the moment so I'm there. And the director of the global ecosystem for ocean solutions which is another UN initiative but in this case, a UN program, and I will give you some of the information of the developments of the program during the last year and some of the work that we're expecting to do for the years to come. So, let me see if I can. Okay. Okay, yes. So first of all this UN ocean visions UN decade collaborative center. It's dedicated to climate solutions specifically. And that is our main main characteristic outside and this is part of a collaboration with Georgia aquarium and Georgia tech. And the main goal that we have is to lead the process to support the co design development testing and delivering of scalable and equitable ocean based solutions to mitigate and reverse the effects of climate change. That, that is what makes our program, the most unique, and particularly the emphasis on mitigation and innovation. And the center works. Contribute the centers work contributes to the UN ocean decade. Through extreme extending and strengthening a focus on ocean based climate solutions and innovations I was mentioning. And the partnership pursue is among other things supporting ocean climate innovations and solutions focus ocean climate solutions research collaborations. Innovation outreach and capacity building. This includes ocean literacy and advancing international collaboration and policy frameworks for development and deployment of ocean climate solutions. So there are three strategic initiatives that the center has been pursuing. One of them is the ocean climate innovation. And this is mostly events, events dedicated to bring together different initiatives different innovators are working on the cutting edge of ocean climate nexus and to allow for space for for sharing and and also to together with other initiatives that are relevant for for their work. We're also hosting a community practice through this ocean climate solutions community. And this is under development but it's part of the establishment initiatives of you see you let's go and the other aspect of this is the hosting of programs and their UN ocean decade. We are working our collaborations through this, this network, and as we have also ocean visions, a program, we are connecting this this global network global in specifically we have a global network of hubs to develop capacity regionally, specifically in areas that have high potential, but where opportunities for access to funding and access to and support has not been particularly great for a time and also to also grow the understanding and concept of what could be done to ocean solutions to mitigate climate change. And then, in terms of activities of 2023 is more full slide. In terms of innovation exchange. There was our participation as a one one relevant agent for the ocean vision summit Georgia aquarium that was probably one of the largest meetings of the year for ocean solutions, and in particular for ocean plan solutions in April. So we organized an innovation showcase and we had specifically UN ocean decade sessions. We have facilitated a blue carbon workshop with international stakeholders to produce a blue carbon roadmap that will be out. We hope in November. And it's one of our contributions for this year. And we also launch a webinar series. And we are costing more than 200 registrants per month in this initiative, also specifically bringing innovators to present their process and present their experiences to an audience that so far has been quite international. In the case of the ocean climate solutions community. So we launched the ocean climate solutions committee of practice by the decade. And also hosting US eco note coordinators. Not coordinator sorry to eco North America by a note. And we have been hosting interns from University of Georgia and from out. We have been engaged many policy, we have been participating in some very relevant forums, including the conference effects of climate change in the world oceans in Norway, earlier this year, state of the coast, Chow and Washington DC. Also, the ocean jobs to surround table, the White House, and the ocean dialogues on the White House, sorry State Department. And you know, shouldn't they get support, we're hosting six programs, global focus for this. And we are also members of the ocean they get kind of working group. So we're having jobs, and these are some clips from media appearances of the center so this this will be will be available of course for you. To check if you are interested. The center has got a lot of attention in the state of Georgia, because of the type of foundation that is bringing and that is not often that the Georgia program will be associated with this type of work and our center is hosted by Georgia and other agencies are in Atlanta. So, in terms of upcoming upcoming events. We have the devotion collected solutions a celebrator. The UN Ocean Conference, they get the notion they get conference in April, next year, we are preparing some events with our international partners. And in exchange, we'll continue as a cycle monthly. And there are some science communication initiatives at the facilities of Georgia Aquarium. In terms of who are the programs right now aligned with the center. As I mentioned, another one led by ocean visions which is the global ecosystem for solutions we have 1000 ocean startups, which is a coalition of new business innovations in the ocean sector. We have the global ocean oxygen decade from IOC UNESCO smart net which is the sustainability of modern ecosystems through global knowledge networks. They will play many initiative and fish core 2030. And so that's all I wanted to present it to you today and I'm available for your questions and in case that I cannot answer your questions as I'm filling into this position right now. I can also take them and answer later. Let's require. Okay, thank you very much Leonardo. Does anyone have a quick question at this time. Okay. So let's go, go ahead and get the second presentation from the other decade coordination center and this one. It's Rebecca Martin from the Northeast Pacific Ocean decade. Hi there. Just getting my screen. Okay, I can hear you just fine. Yeah, and your screen is coming up. Terrific. Thank you so much. Oh, thank you so much for the invitation to speak with you all again today about the progress we've been making under the ocean decade. I'm the executive director for the ocean decade collaborative Center for the Northeast Pacific. And I'm joining you from my home on the territory of the quits and Mellahat First Nations of the Northeast Pacific, also known as the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island in British Columbia in Canada. I also just want to acknowledge the traditional ancestral and unseated territories of all the indigenous peoples that have called the Northeast Pacific region home since time immemorial. And note that we focus very much on indigenous and rights holder engagement in our region so it's very important for us to point to the folks in the region that we work closely with. So, for those of you that don't know us we're one of the few decade collaborative centers that was first to be endorsed as of June 2022. We're a contribution to the ocean decade from the Tula Foundation, which is a BC based private foundation that also hosts the hack I Institute was it ocean observing network, and also supports a hack I magazine which does a lot of communications about environmental issues around the oceans around the world. So as a regional collaborative center different from the one that Leonardo just presented, which is more thematic. Our aim is to make the ocean decade a success in our region to support facilitate to support and facilitate co designed and co produced knowledge for collaborative solutions to the ocean challenges in our region. Our region includes the coastal and open oceans off the US and Canadian West Coast from Alaska to California and everything in between with extensions down into Baja California and Hawaii. And our center actually aims to tackle all of the challenges and outcomes that were identified in the ocean decade implementation plan so from climate change to food security to the blue economy. We have a large scope. And in this case we don't really have those, you know, specific programs that we work with technically we're open to working with programs and projects and groups that are interested in working in our region. So our role in the ocean decade are multi multi factorial. They're really about cultivating connections and exchanges across communities, knowledge systems and boundaries. To identify ocean knowledge gaps and opportunities to catalyze action that are centered on community needs. Share the stories of the ocean decade specifically ocean decade actions, really raising awareness and highlighting diverse work and opportunities in our region, and to mobilize knowledge and resources to accelerate transformative solutions. So over the past year and a half we've grown from a group of three full time staff to nine staff total which full summer full time summer part time, our combined time is about five FTE. And we go back, we are a group of all women, it turns out, with the diverse set of skills, including communication specialists facilitators project managers scientists with a range of backgrounds anything from oceanography to ecology. to archaeology and anthropology. And as I mentioned we're part of the tool of foundation and so are also supported by the tool of foundations administrative staff and other scientists and specialists across our organization. We also have a broad group of advisors from across the region including folks in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, as well as British Columbia, ranging from government to NGOs academia research science institutions, and indigenous communities, again with a broad range of skills and backgrounds. We actually do. I think I've spoken to many of you before but in case, you know you're not familiar with our work. We do a lot of what has been talked about here hosting dialogues and conference sessions and workshops centered on our regional issues and priorities. We really work to synthesize and mobilize knowledge and identify gaps and opportunities to fill those gaps, at least in this early part of the ocean decade. We also work to communicate and amplify ocean decade actions in our region and generally various work of groups around the region, as well as to support global and regional awareness of the challenges and solutions that are taking place in our region. We work very carefully to support and amplify early career ocean professionals and indigenous voices and underserved communities in our decade and the ocean decade. This is something that we're continuing to build and work on and something that will continue to do over time. But we find it's very important to engage rights holders and stakeholders in our region, particularly those that are typically again underserved. We work on developing networking tools and forums so that we can be a regional hub for information and opportunities so we do that in a number of ways I'll talk about shortly. And again we build relationships and opportunities for decade actions to work with each other but also with other ocean decade organizations through the DCC's DCOs, the Canadian Ocean Decade Champions, as well as a number of stakeholders and rights holders. We have a really busy first year, so collectively as a group we participated in or hosted over 253 meetings and events, reaching close to 10,000 people so we have a broad network which is very exciting. Our work has been primarily focused in the Northeast Pacific with strong participation from Canada and the US, but our reach does extend to other parts of the world. We do try to collect this information as we go things around gender and participation from various types of stakeholders. This is something we're continuing to work on and are really interested in thinking about how to do this better. We've extended our reach is through our new Ocean Decade Dialogue Series, which intends to convene conversations among ocean scientists, practitioners, and community members in the region, really highlighting timely topics and new advances in ocean science through the lens of the decade, and really grounded in the interests and priorities of the communities that we work with. We do this for about an hour, usually typically hosting a conversation and then also a 30 minute session with early group professionals that are acting as hosts and supporting direct conversations between the speakers of the dialogue and the ECOPS which really enhances direct experience and hands-on experience and facilitation and extending networks for the ECOPS in our region. Last year we've hosted five dialogues that you can see here that pull together various experts and stakeholders around various topics that highlight different actions in our region where possible. So for example, we hosted a dialogue on using environmental DNA for monitoring and stewardship in the Northeast Pacific in collaboration with the Ocean Biomolecular Observing Network Program that's led by Margaret Linen from Scripps, as well as with groups from other parts of the region that our projects endorsed. So for example, the HACI Institute highlighted work of their project that's endorsed under the Ocean Decade called the High Bond Project, which includes monitoring and partnership with the Mama Lila Kula First Nation and their newly established indigenous protected and conserved area. And Zach Gold showcased the EDNA work that he leads at NOAA specific marine environmental laboratory. So really trying to get a broad perspective of different groups across the region. We have other dialogues that are queued up. So we have one on kelp mapping guidance that was an endorsed decade action and activity in our region. We're hosting one in English and one in Spanish. We're also extending our reach to the Global South, and then also one with NOAA's MPA's as Sentinels program with a focus on the National Marine Sanctuaries that will be in partnership with Selena, who's there here in the room, and Madison Miller from NOAA. So examples of ways that we can partner with different actions in our region. We're also working to move beyond dialogues to actively collaborate on larger, longer type of formats or workshops that really allow for deeper discussion. So the aim of these workshops is to bring together and amplify the voices of rights holders and stakeholders to really dig into those topics and illuminate knowledge gaps barriers and opportunities for collaboration. So over the next nine months, we're going to be co hosting four to five workshops and a variety of topics. So for example at the Pisces meeting, which will be taking place in Seattle in October, maybe some of you will be there. We'll be hosting with the Alaska Fisheries Science Center from NOAA, a workshop on indigenous and community led approaches to support climate change adaptation and ecosystem resilience and the North Pacific and Arctic. And also be attending that meeting. So if you're there, please take a look and find some of our staff I'll be there. A series of workshops, we're also be hosting on cultural heritage and climate change, beginning in December of 2023, focused on the impacts of climate change on tangible and intangible cultural heritage in the Northeast Pacific. And we have a steering committee that is made up of a number of experts and indigenous scholars in our region. We'll be doing a deeper dive on EDNA use and management in March of 2024 with the obon related projects. And we've heard as part of that and also beyond that conversation, we need to start addressing the issue of data sovereignty and implementation of the care principles. So it's glad to hear see that come up in the chat today because that's something we'll be continuing to work on and happy to chat more about how we, we plan to do that in a region. We're also going to be hopefully hosting a side event in Barcelona on co-designing and co-producing knowledge with communities in partnership with some of the partners from the foundations dialogue. We also participate in that with our Tula Foundation hat on and we'll be participating, we are currently participating in the Ocean Decade Vision 2030 process on working groups one, two and 10. So looking forward to hopefully seeing some of you there. As I mentioned a big part of what we do is communicating the work of our center and the decade actions in our region. And just to note, we have a number of ways that we try to raise awareness and amplify this work. We've established strong presence over a number of external channels. We have a website that has over 6000 unique visitors, a newsletter with over 1000 subscribers. Our social media channels are continuing to build. We typically use the platform formerly known as Twitter, as well as LinkedIn and Facebook, and building out again that opportunity for others to know about the Ocean Decade. We also have a community of practice on the Ocean Decade Network, which we're testing to see if that's a useful way of people connecting. And finally, we're beginning to start a new campaign called people of the Ocean Decade, which aims to tell the story of teams dedicated, dedicated to making the Ocean Decade a success so various passionate ocean ocean professionals and really using this as a doorway for folks to get to know the Ocean Decade, as well as projects in the region. So we've developed some deeper, longer pieces that are in our news section on our website. And then we're also putting together a reel to share at meetings and conferences that will have QR codes that have direct access so again ways that people can find out more about the Ocean Decade. And I think it appeals if you can see beautiful humans like Sharice here who's the head of the deep sea ecology program with DFO, and led Seamount mapping expedition with the Hida nation and new challenge tribal council. So happy to talk more with all of you if there's ways that we can use this to support actions in the region. And finally, just everything that we do is really meant to support and catalyze endorse activities in the region to date we've catalyzed seven Ocean Decade activities and four projects, and we have five or six projects that are in the queue. And maybe just to go back to what Heather Spence and Liz mentioned, you know, we are always trying to tell the benefits of participating in the Ocean Decade. And this is something we can start to provide some insight into in terms of what we're hearing, but also something we can use support with so if there's opportunity for the National Decade Committee to lead in that space would be very welcome. One thing I wanted to mention, you know, funding is obviously something people have mentioned quite a lot. It's something we're also working to catalyze through the Foundation's dialogue. But one example is some funding we recently helped catalyze through the province of British Columbia. We received $1.7 million that we're hosting in support of new projects that tackle the objectives and actions laid out in the British Columbia Ocean certification and hypoxia action plan, which is endorsed under the Ocean Certification Research for Stainability Program. And just to note that one of the reasons that money actually was targeted towards that action plan is because it was endorsed under the UN Decade so something to note it can actually help to be endorsed to actually get funding within government. I know that was a lot very quickly, but I'm happy if anybody wants to reach out to me at any time you can contact me through our Ocean Decade email or directly. And I encourage you to keep an eye on the various events and things that we're hosting over the coming months and come find us at the various conferences. Thanks so much. Thank you very much Rebecca and like to open it up to any questions or comments now. Good afternoon. Yeah, so I guess, you know, I'm really interested to hear what you said about having an endorsed program that now has some funding. And so I guess I was kind of curious is that. Do you think it was something that in their proposal they mentioned that they had the endorsement of the Ocean Decade and that was one of the selling points for funding the proposal. Or was it an actual call for endorsed programs. It was actually money that was mobilized because one of the co partners of that action plan is the province of British Columbia, but the, the lead of that program actually went to internal government partners and said look we need money to get this off the ground. Is there any money available. And by the way this is a UN endorsed action and is something that people are seeing and could really highlight, you know, the, the provincial government's leadership. And so it was able to get that money to kickstart this and it's actually created a lot of buzz in government so really in this case it's a provincial government. Which is obviously akin to state government but because it was endorsed it got attention. And so that's where that, how that funding came through and then we are the recipients of the funds because they needed an external partner to actually help implement this. So that the province would be a bit of an arms length. And, and so that's our role in supporting the project in this case. Yeah, that's great. It really helps to hear some of those details to really understand, you know, maybe where there's some opportunities, certainly in Canada, maybe there's something in the US as well. Yeah. So anyone else and you know I can open it up, you know more broadly as well for comments or questions. At this stage. Okay, I think people may need more coffee or at least to stand up and walk around get the blood moving. So, why don't we take a 10 minute break and or a 12 minute break we can reconvene at 330. And that's when we're going to hear from the inner Academy partnership and also the advisory council and we'll be talking in particular about planning for the Barcelona conference. So see you at 330 Eastern. Yeah, so snacks and coffee. Very important. And it's right across the hall from us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So our little break seems to have gotten a little bit longer so I apologize to those of you who are online that we are be convening now. And this will be our last set of speakers for the day. And it's really focusing on the 2024 UN Ocean decade conference which will be in Barcelona in April. And this is really thinking about what are some potential opportunities for the US National Committee to participate in in the conference. And again, you know, right now we're thinking about what can we do that'll make a difference. So that's that's kind of the theme of the day. And so, yes, well, that was the break, you know, is for more coffee and hopefully and I'm sure in Barcelona they'll have coffee too. So, yeah. So the first speaker today is going to be running a close tea and she's at the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, she was a colleague in the division on earth and life studies until she went international. And so now she, she wears two hats. And, but one of them is working with the Interacademy partnership. And that's really the one that we've been interested in, since we're a US National Committee affiliated with the National Academy of Sciences, seeing if that's a model that might be adopted by other countries that are interested in having national committees. So, Ronnie. Thank you very much. So, and thank you very much for the invitation to have a discussion with you today. I don't see myself as a speaker, but I hope that this is a discussion. As you said, I direct a program within the policy and global affairs of the US National Academies. I direct the Interacademy partnership. And I also direct the second program also within international I or a board I should say the board on international scientific organizations, which is the host of 18 US National Committees for ranging from chemistry, biology, astronomy and others. And my board is also serves as the US National Committee to the International Science Council. So a lot of international work, which is relatively new to me for many years I was doing, I was running studies on radiation health issues in the division that Sue is part of. So today I will talk about IAP to give you an idea of what we do, perhaps what the capabilities are to work collaboratively. And I could kind of overhear the discussion in that side of the table about the challenge of international work starting with who pays for what. I don't think we lack good ideas, but then the implementation is not always easy. So IAP or Interacademy partnership is a network of 150 Academies of Science, Medicine and Engineering globally. In the US, as you know, what we call NASEM, the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has three honorary organizations, two of them, the science and medicine are also part of IAP but engineering is not. But we do value the interdisciplinary work because we understand that all global problems require interdisciplinary work. So we try to work with Academies of Science, Medicine and Engineering. The NAS, so not NASEM, but NAS is hosting the Secretariat for IAP. And there is a second secretariat in Trieste, which operationally is part of the UNESCO system. So we have some relationship with UNESCO through them. We don't have specific areas where we focus on. We often react to what our members think it's an important problem either regionally or globally. But some of the highlights of our work the last five or six years is on climate health, on food security, but we also do quite a bit of work on research integrity. And we had a recent report on predatory journals that was kind of a highlight of the past couple of years at least. So talking to Sue, because we are colleagues for a decade or more, she was the one who approached me in my new role as IAP to have just a brainstorming discussion whether IAP could assist countries to create a national decade committee similar to what is happening within the United States. And to the best of my knowledge, and Sue correct me if I'm wrong, the National Academies is the only Academies who is hosting a national committee. All the others are either belong to a government agency or some kind of entity that is quasi-governmental. So, Sue and I started discussions internally, then we talked to a UNESCO representative who understand is the Leads for UNESCO Decade Coordination Unit. We had a very positive response from him. And as perhaps a focus area, he thought and we agreed that perhaps working with the African region could lead to something fruitful. The idea is that they would benefit from understanding what the model is within the U.S. National Academies and perhaps we can help them with transfer of lessons learned. So after the meeting with the UNESCO representative at headquarters, we talked to the regional representative who was also on board and then connected us with the task force for the National Decade. We had a sincere discussion about the challenges that again my understanding is that even within the U.S., the committee is still trying to figure out what exactly the contributions can be and be as effective as possible. So we're very aware of not pretending that we can help another region when we know that there are issues. And it's not only helping them set up a committee, but also help them maintain a committee or have the appropriate base there to make the committee functional. So what I'm hoping I would get from discussing with you today is your thoughts about this, whether it's something you're interested and it's supported and any ideas you have on how we can be an effective partner in that effort. And again, with any maybe as a closing remark with any of my international work, the idea is not to force a model, the U.S. model, because we do things right, although I think the scientific community within the United States is extremely strong, but also adjust the thinking for the regional circumstances. They're very different continents, very different regions with very different resources and a way of thinking. So I'm welcome any comments you have about this idea altogether. Well, thank you, Ronnie. Yeah, just one thing I'll mention, I mean, there are, well, there are a couple of one was, you know, the initial questions came up about how do you support a national committee? Where does the support come from? And certainly in some of those countries, that's going to be, you know, probably a more difficult issue than it was for the U.S. And then the other one was that they brought up was having help in terms of getting their activities endorsed. So they felt that they could really use some assistance there. And I see maybe some real opportunities there if we can identify, you know, some of the programs that they would like to see get endorsed and identify potential partners in our community who could perhaps help them do that. So that was, those are a couple of other things. Let's see Tom. Thank you for your comments. I often say in this committee that I worry that we forget the last three words in the title of the program read it's the UN decade for ocean science for sustainable development and we've spent a lot of time on the ocean science side of things. And I think there are broad advantages to thinking about capacity development in general in ocean science, one element of which could be the role a national committee could play. But, but I do think that's a that would be a rich heritage from a, an UN ocean decade. If we help develop scientific capacity. I'll throw this back at you Tom do you have anything specific in mind of some way that the US National Committee might be able to contribute to that. I thought you were going to ask me if there were places I would like like to go but I'll ask that next. No, I think, I think there are really important ways to think about how sort of academic university based science interacts with government science and policy interacts with with private science in ways that that the US has had to face in in many ways, in ways in which developing nations haven't so David you mentioned in your presentation the idea of one of the challenges is nations quite legitimately have rights to the data in their areas. And in many cases they haven't thought about that in many cases. Yeah, in many cases other companies have come in and and assumed those rights and kept them for themselves as as oil development as a as a good example. I think anything the US can do to can to help further a dialogue among that triumvirate of of civil society, more than more than three but civil society, academic science, government science and oversight and and private industry, I think would be really helpful. So I'm wondering if there is a role here for the decade to engage with philanthropic agencies to kind of show them opportunities that might be available with developing countries. I know that there's a really exciting program that I think Scripps has in Nigeria that we've heard about before. So is there a way to highlight that to perhaps interested universities and philanthropic partners. I'm my information stated but the decade has attempted the IOC in Paris and their staff has attempted to collect philanthropies to try and get them targeted on opportunities within the decade for for the programs and projects. I think the challenge that those philanthropies have is is reading through the phone book of 200 projects nested under 30 plus or 40 programs and really understanding how do these nest and you can ask yourself the rhetorical question of how many ocean observation of whatever indicator have we already seen and heard in reviewing the decade material it's really hard to get a handle on that which is an impediment. It's not the burden of the United States National Committee to organize that I think that's the IOC burden to organize that better so they could sell better I think they know that, but they haven't so far realized the resources in order to put enough that done. So I think that's what's holding up some of the philanthropy. And then also the real key is figuring out which philanthropy has an interest in what subject, because that's also more on family foundations there's a there's a personally held virtue and value that some might help. But if we can, if we can show where it has been successful in a couple of ways and I think we had a presentation here with ocean visions and others to be looking at Well, this has worked and that's worked so so lead by the successful examples I think that's an excellent suggestion. Thank you. Charlotte I think I see your hand up. Thank you. Yes, I mean I think just to continue along that philanthropy, you know to jump on the philanthropy bandwagon. And I see Mark has his hand up. We're both members of that philanthropy group the foundations dialogue which, frankly, well, we're both members of that group. I will say, in reference though to the National Committee and the I think conversations that are that are present right now I think leading by example there are opportunities where other governments have stepped up in areas where they feel expertise, particularly around capacity developments needed and in particular there is what's called a capacity. It's called the capacity development facility. Now that throws everybody off because it's not actually a facility right now it's a person who sits at IOC who is going to be instrumental in trying to bring attention to the capacity development within the decade across all programs and so that that facility is being stood up right now by the government of Flanders Belgium but we will need additional support. I see it as a way that the US, even without dollars, the National Committee could contribute in kind to that, as they're still putting their ideas together about what that, what that facility does. I see a great in kind contribution here if that's all the US can muster at this point which meaning the US government. So I think that's, you know, I think that's definitely a place I would look the woman who I had the privilege of sitting through a three hour UN Decade Advisory Board meeting this morning. So this has been a UN day for me, but I did meet the woman who's just been hired to run that capacity development facility and her name is Mary Frances Davidson and I know she's eager to talk to anybody who has ideas so I'll put that out there. I'll just say on the second piece which is the philanthropy matching philanthropy with the decades I think you are correct that no philanthropic institution I have found yet has sorted through the web pages. I don't even sort through all the web pages and I'm supposed to know what all the programs are to be able to figure out where matchmaking can happen and so they're at the last foundations dialogue meeting which was the summer, a small group formed from that group to try to figure out what they're calling a matchmaking tool. I hate tools but this is what they came up with, where they're trying to, frankly, figure out some algorithms where you can sort through all the programs projects and activities on the UN Decade website, and match those up, you know, and look for things you're, you're interested in supporting so it's supposed to be for philanthropy, or philanthropy philanthropy is leading the small groups leading the charge to try to build this tool. To be honest, it would be applicable to anybody looking for programs that they're interested in whether it's universities or researchers who want to join and, you know, look for what projects are are supported. So I think there could be broader application of this tool but it is, it also needs funding to support the tool so we're a little bit in a, you know, where's the money and how are we going to support all of this but, but those conversations are happening I just wanted to share. Yes. Go ahead, Nicole. Yeah, thank you. Charlotte, thank you for those comments those sort of spurred a couple of things that I wanted to make some points for one of the hopeful outcomes of the new budgeting process that we agreed to at the IOC and have not yet implemented we'll be doing that in the coming months. So what we're going to do is that we are going to be working with the IOC secretariat to develop more standardized ways for the regional bodies to provide their requirements so that we can better understand those in a transparent way so that not only we can set our requirements internally to the IOC but we were also very clear in our discussions that the ability for those requirements to be written down and understandable is an opportunity if we know we're not going to be able to fund them all. But it is a way to begin to convey to others what we see as the observing requirements in the different regional bodies and that kind of thing so that's so that's one thing it was sort of a we know we're not going to be able to fund all these things but let's get it in a way that can be conveyed to others. The second idea and I've been sort of chatting with Liz about this we, we might want to consider for New York climate week next year is having some kind of a presence and maybe there was one I only attended a few events. The events that I attended were all associated with very large investment and financial firms looking to provide very large amounts of money. And they were very interested in ocean and coastal issues and I sort of stumbled not stumbled but it wasn't a very strategic or coordinated engagement across maybe IOC or you in decade or some other things that we might think about doing next year because they there was a very large amount of money there and then just similar and maybe it's a matchmaking tool or event, but we're thinking a lot about that when we are able to elucidate these demand signals, and not have the funding to back that up and I am talking with the right now about all of the great IRA and BIO money we got to do all kinds of things associated with climate resilience and every single one of us across the board is having a demand signal come in that's 1020 30 or more times the amount of money that we have. That's data right there and I've already talked with my own personal team back at the National Ocean Service about how we use that data, but we're also sitting down with the other federal agencies and saying okay so what do we do with that information. Because I think right now the world on the street is we're all flushed with cash and the problem is going to go away in a few years because we'll have it all solve. When you have 2030 or more time demand signal for habitat restoration coastal resilience resilient ports whatever your flight whatever your thing is. It's another kind of piece of information that gives you pause about how you're going to place yourself for the future. But anyway, lots of matchmaking ideas. Yeah, I guess the only thing I'll add is that actually with this, I think it was Liz's suggestion, we did put in a searchable database on our website for the endorsed actions that are have us involvement so at least for matchmaking, you know with those projects you know there is. There is that resource available. Mark. Thank you very much. When when coming on on climate week we did host a very large event for the decade. Using the vessel Atlantis to host a reception and train again drum bump more attention and announce the foundations dialogue statement from Monaco the most recent. dialogue meeting. And then of course I was involved in many of the investment meetings during climate week as well that we're focused on on oceans. But I don't think there's an intersection between the investment houses, the banks the multilateral banks and the decade and I think there's a fault of outreach, or outreach ability by the IOC to do so. That could be a role that we as a national committee could do a better job of is reaching out to the private sector to the banking and lending sector finance sector, etc. But I raised my hand back when when Craig was talking and I'm going to to, you know, kindly push back a little bit on on the idea that, you know, the funders just can't find the stuff to write a check for. I don't I don't think that that's true. I think, you know, we advised Vladimir and the IOC from day one, they needed to get the funders of all kinds involved early in the decade and have buy in, and none of that advice was ever followed. And so there was a real sort of disconnect in which the IOC consulted the audiences that they're used to consulting scientists and governments and the government's usually being their funders, but did not really consult much more broadly than that. And I think that therefore no one sees this as something they have ownership of or a role in and so they don't see their ideas reflected. And so I think we're barely scratching the surface with the Foundation's dialogue and laying out a set of concepts around co design and, you know, figuring out if philanthropists can pick that as something they're willing and capable of supporting. I think we're beginning to, you know, see some traction on that out of the Boke-Nadel statement from the second Foundation's dialogue meeting. But I don't think it's, you know, not not being able to find stuff right. You know, these are sophisticated organizations and, you know, they have the capacity to figure this out. The problem really is, you know, the time cycles for foundations to make decisions can sometimes be a minimum of 24 months and where we're only three years into the decade. You know, and we've, we took us, you know, a while to reach them, and it's going to take a while for this to even get folded in, assuming they decide there's alignment with their missions and their goals. But, you know, they, you know, when we first started talking to them about the decade, they were like, well, we're fully subscribed. We have no extra money. And so we're sitting here with this thing with, you know, no U.S. government leadership, no U.S. money, no philanthropic money. And so, and I will credit, give great credit to the, you know, couple of Foundation, I'm sorry, decade centers that have been funded as something that is out in front, but a lot more is obviously needed. And I think we need to really keep talking about, you know, what this all looks like and get the philanthropists to see it as having value. Then after that finding the projects to support is a no brainer. I don't, I'm not, I am not worried about that at all. David Miller. Yeah, I just wanted to follow up to Mark's comment and to Nicole's comment around the discussions in New York at Climate Week. I was there as well and was in many meetings that brought together private investment and financing community with government with NGOs right and I think it's a fair point and a fair comment that the ocean decade. There is a disconnect between that community and the ocean decade, the ocean decade is very science focused. And what the investment community and finance communities looking for is data that will be risk their investment and that will come from an improved regulatory framework or certainty in regulatory frameworks. Globally, and it will require data to support that that de-risking right. So, we're also very involved with the UN Ocean, sorry, the UN Global Compact Ocean Stewardship Coalition, which is very focused on finance and investment. And even though those are two UN organizations and this is a UN committee for the US. I think it's I just want to highlight there's an incredibly important but still missing link between the work of the UN Global Compact and the UN Ocean Decade to help bridge that connection between finance investment and the science and the data. I'll just jump in very quickly and say, you know, we worked with the UN Global Compact in New York for an entire day's worth of conversations around financing the blue economy and had all of the major international banks, multilateral banks, etc. So, I think it's a very important question, and not once did the decade of ocean science, you know, enter the conversation, you even, you know, it was, let me state that a different way. It was raised, but it never became a subject of interest or conversation. Liz, thank you. I'm going to speak out of turn a mark, but could it be said that that event in New York that happened last week came about because somewhat of the renewed focus and the science that underpins sustainable decision making in the world. Call it the decade or call it the SDGs. I mean, like that, that that meeting of the minds that you had, was it stimulated by this idea of, hey, we got to rethink and refocus our energy and supporting science underpinning sustainable development. Like, I think the fact that decade wasn't mentioned, it should be less of a concern for us coming from the United States in particular and the differing politics around opinions about UN. But let's be clear, you know, it's not about the UN here, it's about countries that came together and decided that it's a good idea to refocus our energy about how ocean science underpins our decision making. And so I, I don't mean to be talking through the question I'm asking you, Mark, and I think I kind of want to hear your response. So I'm going to stop talking now, but you know. Absolutely. And, and, you know, I think this goes goes back to come in earlier about always remembering the SD part of the name of the decade, you know, our all of the conversations were about the sustainable development goals in general. And the UN Global Compact has, you know, the whole effort around the oceans for STG-14 and has various other conversations going around other efforts. Whether science is the foundation is assumed, perhaps, but I think the whole idea is, you know, how do we, how do they as lenders and investors put money behind, you know, projects that constitute sustainable development and because they're profit making corporations that will produce a return for them. And, you know, I think they've got some creative ideas in mind, and some of them will require scientific activities such as, you know, restoration and protection of blue carbon. But, you know, again, I would say they're not necessarily focusing on, you know, the decade or the need for science to underpin their lending or investing. Does that make sense? And do you mind if I jump in again real quick? This is really helping me a lot. Mark, thank you for bringing in, I did not mean to forget. I do know that there were a lot of other activities going on at you in decade, sorry, at New York Climate Week that I was not a part of. But this kind of a debrief, I think is really important because the rooms that I was in having conversations were about the data, ocean data and coastal data availability, a little bit for sustainability, but also for climate adaptation. So it was a little bit of they those folks want to know how can I make sure the data will be available to me to de-risk my business to make money down the road, right? No, nothing shy about that. But there is a good overlap. There is enough complementarity here, I think that that we can, I don't know if it's hone or messaging or and maybe doesn't have to be about the decade. But so, for example, I was at the launch of the Morgan Stanley big sustainability initiative, and it was about sustainability, but it was also climate de-risking, right? And they were very interested in finding out where the data is going to come from. So maybe somewhat of a debrief, even more than this would be useful. Mark, I'd be happy to tag up with you and Charlotte after. Sounds great. Thank you. Mark, I'm going to put the ping-pong ball back up in the air and hit it where you want. But there are a lot of people in the investment community that are chasing marine carbon dioxide removal. And money is being spent on it. And I don't know that it's being spent in the right place, because we don't know that marine carbon dioxide removal is a viable solution until science is performed. Yet we do have investments being made in those directions and people are ramping up for it. Now it raises a whole number of risk-based questions, what is the environmental impact, etc. So number one, there's science that needs to be done in order to figure out, will this work? But the other half of it is, we won't know if it works until we have a more robust and more widely distributed three-dimensionally observing system in the ocean. The notion of not engaging, so I'm following your statement, Mark, that a lot of the potential investors aren't really asking for more science. But if they're doing their due diligence, I think they will realize what a speculative nature of planning to invest in marine carbon dioxide removal is at this point in time until more science is done. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And we're working part of our involvement in these conversations is to raise the question about doing adequate due diligence on any of these climate geoengineering projects, including carbon dioxide removal, and what is necessary to understand about what the efficacy is and whether long-term storage actually works or not. And sometimes that produces glazing over people's eyes in the finance community, but it is something that we are talking regularly to them all about. I do think, again, because they're focused on where they could make a return, they see that and the potential to create credits or something else as a fundable or a lindable activity where planting seagrasses is not as such. And so part of this is educational. And I think we can do collectively do a good job on improving that. But yeah, I think that's one of the things they're focusing on and need to do a better job thinking through what is necessary for success and proving it up. You know, there's a code of conduct for doing experiments with Ocean CDR coming out shortly. I believe in the next two weeks, I was just one of the reviewers on it. And so I'm hopeful that we, you know, shout all of this stuff out loudly going forward, and we don't waste a whole bunch of investments on chasing unproven expensive technology, particularly on the mechanical and chemical Ocean CDR side. I was just, I was just thinking about the, the sustainable development piece, and what you were saying about the IP and thinking about, where are there, like, where's the low hanging fruit for new initiatives or collaborations with kind of tangible, because also coming off this conversation with MCDR like what there's some things that are part, you know, our topics are within the ocean realm of the ocean decade that are like, could have tangible local benefits and thinking about things like energy, national security, even, and I don't know how much national security or, you know, security type things are even part of the conversation, but that there's all there's lots of, you know, close to resilience but also protections could kind of have that kind of angle. And so I guess, I'm just, you know, I guess I guess want to raise that as a question, you know, are those things, I mean I know energy is part of it like putting on my other hat but is the security angle one that's being part. Do you guys agree that this is one of the ways that we could foster more tangible initiatives, get bring in buy in with, you know, for example, if you're looking at like applied science in Africa. Anyway, it's not it's a, it's a proto thought but I thought I threw it out there. No, I think you're, you're spot on I think there are conversations about coastal resilience, adaptation, retreat from coast, etc items that can be fundable and and or avoided by insurance companies risks to be avoided by insurance companies so there's a lot of conversation about that side of thing within the funding side of things. I think the security piece is also very loud and clear I think there's a concern about disruption from climate refugees. I think there is concern about anticipatory retaliation for weather modification projects. I think that if there are some kinds of CDR projects that involve putting alkaline materials or other materials in the ocean. There may be neighboring countries who object to those on pollution grounds and various other arguments that are being made that are rising up. What's not happening and you sort of your are heading in the right direction with a proto question is, you know, how do we talk about the role of the decade in getting the science together. I think it was Craig's voice earlier that shows us, you know, how much we need the observing in order to know whether any of these things work or don't work or even, you know, quickly recognize if they're causing. Unintended harm. And so, you know, figuring out how to connect the dots and show the value of the kind of things that are suggested to to move forward and have the basis for making any of these decisions I think is is a real opportunity. Okay, I'm going to say hold your questions. We're going to move on to April people who came. I think all the way from California to join us today to talk about some of the plans that they're putting together for the Barcelona conference in association with the Youth Advisory Council. So, April, do you want you can come up here and Can you hear me? Yeah. Okay. And can you have a run on the from the slides? Is that possible? All right. So I'm going to actually skip some of these slides and I'll just say to jump to future slides. I think a lot of you here have heard the Youth Advisory Council and from some of the youth, this is, we're now entering the fourth cohort so rather than share about the Youth Advisory Council and I'm going to jump straight into why I'm here. My name is April Keebler. I'm executive director of airs to our oceans and the founding director. And the, the US Youth Advisory Council for the ocean decade is an initiative of airs to our ocean just so that you understand what that relationship is. And if you could jump down please to slide five. And what we could do I hope is if anyone wants more information on the advisory council and what we do, maybe you could share the slide deck with everyone that would be super. So this is a fourth cohort with 64 applicants. It's a it's a meaty healthy fantastic cohort. We do recruit from also territories so that you have here a youth from Tinian Island and CNMI. We're very happy about that. The slide six please next one. The commitment that Madison Miller, she was in the first cohort I see her chat. Yay, hi Madison. So our shared home like this is kind of the vehicle in which we connect the youth we connect them in purpose. So it's it's connecting and not just the concept of ocean but our one water system, and really conveying the message that it's our shared home this one water system or this blue planet. And so that shared component becomes a connectivity piece in moving forward in purpose. If you can move down now to slide eight. And briefly, these sorry one more above. Yeah, these are the working group committees there's policy movement education and communications team education in the last cohort created a fantastic toolkit. It is over 80 pages that addresses the 10 challenges of the UN Ocean decade, and they include their youth perspective in each one of those on each one of those challenges. And that is in this final stages, it's a hefty one, it's in its final stages of being edited now so we're going to share with you all once that's done policy last spring. They participated in 47 meetings with us lawmakers in two days time, both virtual and in person so every year, the Youth Advisory Council does that, whether or not they're on the policy committee, they said that all of them are committed to doing that. Next slide. Just really briefly the real world skill building that we work with them in developing on especially the front end. There's a list here, but the reason I'm highlighting right now goal setting and project management is because this is what they're involved doing right now. They're all setting their smart goals for the year. The cohort runs through May. They're developing skills around using project management tools and collaboration skills are a big component, but you see that a leadership is highlighted. That's because it's truly foundational to all of our versions programming and initiatives, and we set through a two hour workshop for the yak. We set a an intensive that is interactive, and it's completely focused on empathetic skill building. So we all want to see more empathetic leaders in the world, including here in the US. And so this is the intention that we have as they move into the year is learning how to operate with one another with active active listening skill building and understanding one another's perceptions. All kinds of components to that if there's conflict recovery. So that's a real important part of what we do. So jumping on down to the other reason I'm here. Next slide please. Is how might the Youth Advisory Council, the US Youth Advisory Council for the ocean decade connect impactfully with the US National Committee. It's always been supportive the US National Committee, we thank you all so much have always been supportive of the advisory council and what they do. I'm thinking now about a bigger and broader message to the, to the world really at the UN ocean decade conference. I sit on the expert working group for challenge 10, and air certions was one of the original decade implementation partners. So we are lucky to have the communications we do at the IOC level and I can tell you that they're very interested in seeing more youth advisory councils at this level, which is a meaningful. They're their voices are amplified. They do what they do they're not tokenized at the other and other states of the UN member states. So what we had started thinking about it and I had mentioned it to Susan which is why I'm here is to process the UN ocean decade conference might be an opportunity to model for other UN member states. What meaningful engagement of youth 25 and under really we engage 25 to 15 in the decade. So it's an opportunity for us to have the attention of other UN member states and and have a collaborative multi generational workshop opportunity. With the youth, I would be there but I would like to bring eight youth from the youth advisory council prior cohorts and this cohort to to workshop with representative from the US National Committee, how this can be done successfully. The reason we're so committed to committed to this heirs tour oceans and also the youth advisory council is because 14 year olds at the beginning of this decade or 24 at the end of the decade. They are well into their careers. And so what we're missing is that piece in mainstream education, the piece around connecting on our blue water planet and and making that real world science real world empowerment skill building curriculum a component of moving forward into the ultimately choosing their careers, but also, once they get it we have a lot of university students actually who we work with, but then moving into their careers no matter quite honestly the industry to do good in those spaces and bring that they've learned through the importance of protecting our planets waters and each other, we're very eco justice oriented and intersectionality is a massive focus of what the youth advisory council does. How does the, the impacts of our ocean impact human rights. So that's a very fast nutshell. We'll send the deck so you can review further and available for any questions anytime and and the youth advisory council is to. I think I'm hopeful that they'll be presenting to you all their voices this cohort on your meeting on December 5. We're looking for confirmation for that. But in the meantime, I'd love to discuss potentially partnering collaborating on the ocean decade conference. It's a big one. Yeah. Thank you, April. Yeah, go ahead and Heather. Well, of course, my ears, but the matter their areas of profession. And I think pointing out that particular really important timeframe in somebody's life and thinking about. Okay, I care about the oceans and how am I going to apply that in my career. And I think one of the things that's challenging. I know in the United States, I think globally is seeing what that career path can be because most people who work in marine sciences or marine biology don't have a job title that is marine biology. And so, and there are many people who are contributing to really important ocean work that are not even scientists. So I anyway, I just, I think that something that highlights the wide array of possible career paths that are very, very reasonable and you can still be part of it is is a great thing that could be done in the workshop. Oh, nice. Take notes while we're talking. I appreciate that. Is there already a commitment for the USNC to be actually at the UN Ocean Conference. Well, I think there's the intent. Let me put it at this point to participate and I'm sure some of our members will be there. And it's my intention to be there as well. So, yeah. But we are still sort of trying to formulate exactly what that's going to look like. I was going to ask you April is because I know you're interested in expanding beyond the US and have you and working with the IOC, the Decade Greenation Unit on that. Can you tell us a little bit about progress in that? Yeah, so after the second cohort, we created a toolkit, which is disseminated by the IOC and NISCO and that's to form a youth advisory council. And Air Sorceress is available on a consultation basis. What we're finding though, and this is also goes to why we're interested in doing this is it ends up being either dismissed. So, I don't want to mention, I'm not going to mention the country. So, there's a country that we've been in communication with in Brazil. I mentioned the country in South Africa, South America, Africa, and Asia. And the challenge with them all is the youth either not having any kind of agency or it's not, nothing's happening. It's not moving forward. That's typically one of the other. That is actually something that has has encouraged us to want to maybe do this with you all at the getting the audience of the UN member states. Because I think if it comes down from the top of the National Committee level, then the support of universities the support of orgs. This is I think is successful because you have a supporting organist case that's Air Sorceress. You have a very supportive US National Committee. And there is it was it was organized intentionally with autonomy so that they could for instance go to Capitol Hill and do various things. But nonetheless, their support. And I think the the opportunity to show what this might look like to allow youth to have voices with policy with really thinking about also educational institutions all different components they can bring in from their personal perspective that toolkit the education tool kits chuck full of perspective which I'm excited to share. But I do think it's an opportunity we've not seen one as successful as this one internationally. Great, go ahead. April, thank you. The EU has been funding an E cops cohort. And have, have they engaged or are they a potential target of collaboration? Could you expand on that please? Yeah, so we have thought about also including E cops. It's interesting because E cops at, you know, post graduate and 35 year old is still considered youth. Specifically, they target 25 year old because at that point the brains fully formed, and it's a youth or as an adult in all respects. The, we are trying to bring more attention to this age group. But, but in that, there have been youth of the, the advisor council who are mentored by E cops. And we are looking for more time and energy put into that relationship, for sure. Yeah, that they would be more positioned, I think, like the US National Committee where it's is more of a mentorship opportunity. We've not collaborated with them as much as we have with the US National Committee. That is, they seem very, very busy as post graduate students quite honestly. It seems that they do better with independent mentors. But with that said, as this evolves and grows in the next year as we hit the fifth cohort, we would like to establish a deeper relationship with the cops. One of the things that appeals to me in that model of blending the two or finding a relationship between the two is that the EU has been rather liberal with finding funds in order to support these activities that maybe the EU could be encouraged to be reaching out earlier, earlier components in the way that you describe them. I like that. I'm noting that. Thank you, sir. So sort of align those lines and then I'll get to Tom. I'm wondering with the, the alumni of the program, and maybe they could be also effective ambassadors for other countries because they've gone on to, you know, their careers and now they're, you know, participants and of course I'm thinking of Madison right now, but I'm sure there are others as well. Yeah, we do have an alumni program that we stay in touch with the those who are interested in supporting future cohorts Madison has been incredible in fact she spoke in our orientation. Such a success story but other youth as well have come back in and are now running for instance public speaking workshop or the policy advocacy workshop. It is, it is truly for both for youth by youth. And so we evolve according to youth feedback, but also the intention is by the end of the decade, youth are are completely running it. And so we're already in those in those steps alumni are part of the support team. They work directly with the working group committees. So the, the intention is that they row into real leadership positions in the in the in the act. But if anyone is interested in in partnering with us at the UN Ocean Conference, you know, any two, three would love to hear from you, my contact information if you could put it on the screen the last slide. That would be fantastic. Thank you so much. My contact information is just there on the bottom. And again I'll be sending this deck out. You sort of got to my question. I think so, but I will say of every year when I think about what this committee has done. The most enjoyable thing we do is here from from from from the yak itself. So glad. I would suggest that the best selling card is the success of the students afterwards, whether they go into ocean science or not. If you're using ocean science to create engaged citizens. It really doesn't matter what they're engaged in. So, I think that's that's the carrot to hang in front of people is that we have a successful program that has produced an engaged citizenry. Not everyone's going to be a marine scientist, even if they're not called a marine scientist, not everyone's going to go into science. But if they feel empowered through that process then that's just outstanding. And several youth actually change career trajectory to environmental science or environmental policy. In fact, I'm writing for letter of recommendation on my way home tonight. So it has been impactful in that way for certain. And part of that impact is the support multi generally multi multi generationally from you all as you listen to them and appreciate what they have to say so thank you for that. Please. April and very nice to meet you as well. I just commend you for rallying the next generation. It's mission critical. It's national security imperative that we have people who care. And I think what you've created certainly is a road to success. I guess my question is, was ears to our oceans, a thing before the decade came along and can you talk a bit about. Thanks. Yeah. So, first, her ocean is an international youth organization it formed in 2016. And its intention is to equip essentially the next generation of leaders with the skill sets they need to create a safer, healthier world. So we go deep into skill building we go very deeply into into real world empowerment skills that you saw the list there of. But also the three buckets that's the center bucket the first one is convene and connect. So we connect you from wide wide range around the globe in overcoming challenging human barriers. Often their cultural often their demographic religion different pieces that otherwise would have separated us and connecting them in purpose. Then there's the education and empowerment commitment that I that we'd shared, but also act and advocate. So we not only help them articulate their stories, both either through public speaking and presenting but also storytelling and digital media as well. And then also we find platforms for them to amplify their voices. So the yak would be false squarely in that. Yeah, so there's there's different programs and initiatives. Okay, well, I'm going to take it since I have the microphone, I'm going to turn to Craig. He's got probably much more experience in this area than anyone else in the room and really talk about, you know, what types of activities. I can imagine at the ocean conference in Barcelona that would make sense for us as the US National Committee to work with the G is there a model out there for us to really develop a meaningful activity. I think what's been most impressive in any of the gatherings whether it's the our ocean conference or whether it's the UN Ocean Conference any of them is is to hear people speaking from the heart. If you had people of that youth cadre that cohort who never get a chance to be heard other than in small groups that are already reinforcing the purpose of having youth speak, but to give youth a podium, and let them have something to express I think that could be very impactful. And to go back to the the CD part, as Tom and as Mark were mentioning, the capacity development for sustainable development, the CD for SD, right, we were developing capacity with these useful people, useful people in order to do what as they mature into their career. And what is their vision for form, what the ocean future might look like now, the stereotypical crusty old white male, which I belong to that class would be oh my gosh what do these kids have to say. But there's been enough said here at this meeting to make us realize that they will be the people who have their hands on on the throttle and the control if if we give them the tools. So, letting people speak from the heart could be, I think, a number one, a an intellectual opportunity. It's also a photo opportunity for maybe members of high state order to come in and be part of that and say oh my God I want my picture taken with all these youngsters from around the globe. There's a visibility that then enhances that opportunity so I think there are a lot of attributes for why creating such a form is that would be very advantageous. Because it's an earlier group than the E cops. And the other point that I would make is to try and and recruit individuals who have specific ideas and vision so they may be borrowed from elsewhere but to hear it said in the voice of young people that they can almost be actionable that they could see what the reality is and people often discount the voice of youth because it's because it's youth and and we're picking people because the value of their thoughts, not simply because they're younger. And you can get a good collection of folks there so that's one thing that I would I would see doing I think that's a nice accommodation. The other thing might be is, use that as a poster for recruitment of other nations to as Sue and others were leading this conversation. Use that as a poster for, hey, you can do this too. And, and imagine what the spread would be because I think too, too deeply rooted in the UN decade machinery is the idea that we stop at the E cops. And you've pointed out April very well that, yeah, okay, that's one threshold, but there is also a subordinate by age, not by value but a subordinate group and cohort that's coming up so I think you could. You could make an impact there and it shows the leadership of the US side in order to be putting some visibility in in that. So those off the top of my head those are the first two ways that I would go don't make it too complicated. You don't have to just let the young people speak to their world to. We've messed it up for them and they're going to have to figure out how to get out of it. Thank you. Thank you. Really appreciate your thoughts really appreciate it. So, and how to stand up first and then I'll go to David. Yeah, I just wanted to reinforce, but with what Tom and was what was just said and that. I think back at all the functions we've had at the UN committee and I just keep going back to the youth presentations and you just kind of go. Wow, the future is bright there is a future where you know you get so wound up and all the other stuff. But you see these young voices and young faces diverse young faces. And you go we're we're going to get there. So I agree with everything when you just said I think that's really puts a face on the future. Yeah, I just reinforced what was said I my question to you April is, do you have a platform already at the conference or are you looking to use the satellite event the mechanism for satellite events to create a platform at the conference. So, for the usdx specifically, I'm, we are going to be meeting as decade implementation partners next week, and that's going to be discussed there. The other piece is, I think it's October 15 when the in conference proposal call for proposals is opened. So that's going to be a space that we're going to also submit for. And this one in particular. There's other, there's other paths other different ways. But this one felt extraordinarily meaningful to impress upon other UN member states, the importance of doing this in a meaningful way. So it is unique and special in my mind. Yeah, I'm not a member of the committee obviously, but I mean what you're pitching. I fully support and think is extremely impactful. I met your daughter. I presume it was your daughter at the UN ocean conference. And she was extremely inspiring. Is this at the side event or in the plenary. It was at the plenary. Okay, so it's Charlie. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, so I think just for my own clarification, are you planning to have a platform or is that with the. That we're, yes, the intention is that there is, there are different avenues that depending upon when things open and and what that looks like. Yes, that's the intention. So, I think you can see from the discussions both with Ronia and also with April that. There are opportunities for the US National Committee and, you know, and they're related because we are thinking about, you know, sort of expanding our reach internationally, not just having our own US focus. And what can we, what can we contribute to this international discussion? You know, both in terms of other US national, there are other national committees. And, and then also thinking about encouraging the development of other youth advisory councils. And just to bring it full circle so it shouldn't fail to recognize with us that this also speaks to the diversity, equity. Inclusion belonging just as study that the committee is trying to launch because if we focus that on university students. We've, we've given the game away. Yes. And did you know comment lives or, or Nicole. No. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Actually, what I did want to mention relative to the ocean decade conference is mindful of the fact you heard it mentioned earlier of this vision 2030 process which yet another phrase yes in the decade land you have to now come understand. So essentially there are these writing teams that are developed and Frank I think mentioned there's like several Americans involved so I kind of mind who those Americans were on those writing committees and I sent them a copy of this fancy little report you all provided because you did put time and energy into thinking what's its success looks like and as I understand this whole vision of 2030 process is it's these teams have been charged with trying to articulate that what is a successful decade. And so I just reminded the Americans on the team that we've got some information here that they may find useful and I guess I wanted to ask able to did did the yes. I mean, I know there's a little in the weeds for them, but you know, it may be worthwhile asking them what they think of how success has been defined here it just might be an interesting thought exercise and I don't know that they want this that they have the time or that whether or not this would entertain. Is that online the publication. It is it's on the National Committee website. Okay, okay. I, and that was kind of it was recently. Was it a relatively new. Yeah, I came out a year about a year ago. Yeah. Okay, I'm going to, I'm going to see about. I think that would be a good project potentially for the Education Committee. So let me propose that. Yeah, go ahead. A question for me. That was a good pub. That was a good product. Has that been distributed to the Hill to the House and Senate Oceans caucus and what's the plural of caucus, I don't know. But have we made made the rounds with that, because that I think could start to help one of the, the, I'll say stalled frustrations that the National Committee has which is, hey, we've done all this work. What's come of it. And, and it could liberate some of the thinking. And if you get the thinking liberated, maybe you get some funds liberated from the Congress about this unique opportunity of leveraging we got half the decade left. By the time you formulate the next budget and see it appropriated. So, maybe, maybe there's a round of visits that the committee can make with that in hand, or to encourage the House and Senate. And then Oceans caucus says, I'll go that way instead, to, to, to have an event, it wouldn't be a hearing, they don't have hearings but they have events where the National Committee can offer its expression of this was, this was the purpose for our creation. This is our ambition clearly stated in a well structured report. And now, where's the beef, where are we going with this. And I just think that's a way to get more visibility on the needs through the vehicle of the US National Committee. So, but I'm a member of the committee that put together a report, but I will say that, you know, I think it's a lot to digest when you look at the whole report. But we also have a presentation, but maybe an infographic just one infographic or a couple that sort of describe each one of the themes would be easier to distribute and explain. Now, and even if you remember the presentation, we kind of have the infographics are there. So, yeah, that would be something that would be relatively easy. I mean, I can get back to Craig and one of the. So, typically at the academies, we will put out basically an offer to to brief a report and it's up to Congress to say, yes, we're interested. And that's that's sort of our typical process. But if we if we had some non federal money and you understand why it has to be non federal money, we could host an event. And then invite, you know, the staff to come to hear about the and of course also, you know, the members to come and hear about the report, but we can't do that with federal funds. So, that's that's one of the constraints. But I do like the idea, you know, a lot of work went into the cross getting themes report and. And I think there's, there's a lot, there's a lot of good material in there. And so how we can get more mileage out of it, I think is really and really, you know, started to get some action is not, you know, not just getting it out there but also stimulating some action is, you know, with something that the committee would really be behind. Yeah, Nicole. I'm just using up all my time here. I really like Liz's idea. I think it's more and not surprised by that. I think it's more than an thought exercise. I think there's a real potential visceral outcome with the what a success look like in year X, right. You know, as you guys written by a bunch of old farts, and then recast, if not in totality, but in the implementation in the granularity by folks that will be X age at that time. Right, you may not admit you would, but maybe you don't invite them to rewrite them, but to say okay, this is what the old farts came up with. What does it look like in your mind and it's crystal balling but it allows them to envision themselves at a certain age. And these outcomes at a certain state. And I think it's, I think it's powerful maybe it is a thought exercise, but I think it could be very powerful way to engage them in this work and how they could look at the list and such as car wash. Right, and that's data. Right, but they may also look at it and be able to find themselves in it and provide feedback for what that that granularity looks like in X number of years right in their lives. I'm thinking the other thing would be powerful. Yeah, the other thing they could think about is if they're, you know, if if the act is interested. That this could also be something we could develop for the Barcelona conference, you know, sort of speaking from the heart and maybe taking some of those, you know, this is, this is what success would look like, as far as we're concerned, because all of the themes that are outlined in that report are mapped on to the decade challenges. So it's a very, you know, it's a very integrative system. And if there is something that, you know, really speaks to some of the the act members, then the committee members could help, you know, them develop this into something that they could present. You know, that conversation could be an enticing way to demonstrate to the youth of other countries or the old parts of other countries. This is what dialogue could look like. Right, it might be a nice, it might be a powerful modeling exercise also if you were to do it in Barcelona. So what's coming to mind is this amazing video where you have both an elder and a youth speaking to the same time and place in a stylistically very engaging way. I'm thinking Kunk on Earth, if anyone's seen that it's absolutely fantastic, but same sort of thing where you've got, you know, somebody's ideas being challenged, but or teased out if you will. And it'd be great if we could get some videography. I have a follow up suggestion that if you if you were to take someone who is of of a native culture from anywhere in the world. And you listen to them I just heard from a young man who was speaking of his grandfather's telling him young man this is what you what you're going to see and what you're going to look forward to. The grandfather who was 83 years old had the compilation of knowledge from multiple previous generations times 1000. This is what happens at this time of year that's when the butterflies come that's what type of fish are here when etc. And the man said, 30 years ago, everything that I had to tell you became obsolete and useless, because we're now learning a new what the new patterns and the behavior of our environment might be. And those sorts of things I remember when we were at ocean arms 19 and there was an entire panel of folks who were representing their culture and their ancestral experience. And that in and of itself was impactful, because it's not just that we're looking at an age class distinction, the old versus the young. We're also looking at in the eyes and wisdom of the people who do have these ages and they speak to represent the ancestral ages as well. And now that's all changed. So I think that's, that might be nice juxtaposition. Thanks. And I know it's not the business of this group but there is no speaker of the house. Oh, sorry, April is this helpful. Are we coming out person. Yeah, and I think it's beautiful. I like, I like the enthusiasm and creativity and again if anyone's going to be there and wants to dive in together with the youth, it would be wonderful. You'll be there. Oh, right on. I'll give you my card. Excellent. Yeah, and I see Madison also put in the chat that she's going to be there and she's, she'll sign up to excellent and Madison I'd love to explore some other things with you as well. I think you probably knew that was coming. Oh, you will be. All right, I'd love to share my part of you. I think, I think we had the nucleus of a program to really develop further for the personal and a conference, which is great. Yeah, that's marvelous. And as anyone sensitive around, you know, the way in which do we make it an in conference workshop or a side event or does anyone have a druthers around that. It'd be a call for proposal right for the, of course, for the, the in conference, not yet opened opening next week. What I understand, but with a side event that deadline to submit is the end of this month. So we'd want to think about what that is. We could go for try both see which one pans out. I'm just going to say I really appreciate it your workshop concept. I think, you know, there's going to be a lot of miles. But this is a workshop for this topic would be, I think, much more effective. Yeah. Yes, just my, my, my thought, I think we'll have plenty of plenty of panels. There's a lot of creativity and what these events side events can look like. But a workshop could be very, very effective in this space, I think. Keep everyone awake and engaged. Just to get him in the room. You know, seriously though I am thinking about that I mean how we do have to think about how we are going to get the right people in the room. Right. And so, and put some, I do think it out. We do have an interest in, in having new member states. Move in if there's a real, if we have a real collaboration. Yeah. So, just one of those things that, you know, in planning this, we should keep that in mind from the, from the beginning of how we're going to really get a good, get the correct audience early for sure. We're reaching out to you fairly soon because, you know, we do have the deck of the meditation partner meeting next week. And I'd love to be able to say, hey, we're, we have our team who's interested in doing this to get that support. Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Did you want to say something? Yeah, it's just a question. I'm just wondering what the timeline. Our. Committees workshop. Ideas is with the DEI and the data. And if those have any focus that can lead up to the. April meeting or is that timing just off. Or if we can. Make something a little larger, more encompassing that's more international UN decade. Yeah, so we have the inclusive and equitable and now the workshops will be held before the April conference. I'm not sure if the proceedings will be available before that, but. We could still have, there's no reason why a member of the planning committee couldn't participate in the conference. If there was. I don't know if they would really have the bandwidth to organize something for the conference themselves, but I can imagine if there was the right. Activity that they would, you know, they could certainly talk about the experience that they had from those workshops. Yeah, I guess I noticed in timelines that a proposal are open for all these side events until the end of this month and not beyond. So anything would be discussed. That would be good. Yeah, I feel guilty if I gave this planning committee another task right now. So, you know, but I mean, we can certainly ask them if they'd be interested, you know, in the site event, but. I don't want, I won't assign it to them. How's that? A question for the folks who are more involved in this now than I am, but is there still a an IOC led body that convenes the national planning committees. Okay, and is there a way to sneak in the side door on that and have the US National Committee co-sponsor with the IOC, a Congress of the National Committees. In my trip to New York, there were three chairs of national committees for the decade who approached me and said, what do we do, because they're having the same challenge. They have a lot of great thoughts, but but implementing those thoughts is the real challenge for them. So a possible strategy would be to find the US National Committee in a role to co-sponsor an event with that body that aggregates all of the National Committee reps. It could be an easy, easy to produce. I don't know what the finances would be, but based on what's available versus what would be demanded, but I think that's a good role for the United States. So I see that Olivier Duprena is on the line from IOC and I don't know if you're awake Olivier, because I know it's quite late where you are, but if you are, do you want to say anything about sort of having this convening of the National Decade Committees? Well, yeah, yeah, I'm still, I can confirm I'm still awake and thanks, thanks a lot for bringing this, this great idea. Indeed, we're starting to see how National Decade Committees can participate in the different events, not only through the satellite events, they might organize and lead themselves, but also will review all the different satellite events to see how you can contribute to others. But back to your suggestion, yes, this is definitely something that we would like to discuss with you and with a few other committees. But I know that the UK also National Committee had the same idea and proposal. This is something we can discuss next week during the meeting of NDC focal points. And of course, if there's an interesting agenda that comes out of the meeting would be happy to consider this proposal. Thank you so much Olivier for jumping in and I really appreciate that you're able to join us this afternoon and your evening. You're welcome. Yes, so I know we're getting to, you know, happy hour time here, so it's 10 after five and so I really thank everyone for a really productive two days. I know it's a very also a very demanding two days of meetings and really appreciate everyone joining us. Particularly, I'll give a shout out to our speakers and April for coming to join us today. We really made a lot of progress in terms of, you know, thinking about what we can do, certainly at the Barcelona conference but, you know, more impactually really thinking about, you know, what we can contribute as the US National Committee to to the decade. So, so thanks everyone and we will have our next decade US National Committee for the ocean decade. Call is going to be, I think in November, but I can't remember what the data is but it's usually the first week in November. So, and that's going to be devoted to John Delaney's urban seas. So this is part two we've already had part one but John signed us up for part two. We will have that and then we're going to be meeting with the next cohort of the advisory council at the December 5th meeting so thanks everyone. Thank you.