At the end of the ” SCIENCE-SOCIETY MEETING FOR IPOS ” symposium held on April 18 and 19, 2023 in Brussels at the Maison Irène et Frédéric Joliot-Curie – a flagship venue for French research at the headquarters of the European Union – at the initiative of the CNRS, the CNRS Foundation signed an agreement to create a new foundation under its aegis: the “Ocean Sustainability Foundation”, headed by Françoise Gaill.
The mission of the Foundation is to support actions to protect marine and ocean environments, and in particular the IPOS (International Panel for Sustainable Oceans) initiative.
After two days dedicated to creating a strong commitment from academic partners to support IPOS, and mobilizing decision-making bodies and representatives of civil society around this project, the creation of this foundation offers an opportunity for individual and corporate sponsors to commit to the success of IPOS’s presentation of its first recommendations prior to the United Nations Conference on the Oceans in Nice in 2025.
The ocean has recently taken center stage in the global geopolitical landscape. Despite the increasing questioning of the effectiveness of multilateralism, attention to ocean issues is emerging as an opportunity to co-create pathways to ocean sustainability at multiple levels. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services show how consensus and integrated knowledge have helped to chart global paths and generate commitments to address, respectively, climate change and biodiversity loss. There is a need for an equally effective global platform focused on ocean sustainability. A proposed International Panel for a Sustainable Ocean (IPOS) is therefore proposed as a coordinating mechanism for integrating knowledge systems to build a collective bridge between ocean science and policy.
This initiative was presented at the ” One Ocean Summit ” in Brest in February 2022, then at the United Nations Ocean Conference in Lisbon in June 2022.
The European Union supports IPOS and has integrated it into its Ocean Strategy, wishing to make it an intergovernmental tool. The IPOS will enrich the global political debate within the framework of the Decade of the Oceans, and promote a shift towards ocean sustainability.
It’s essential to support actions to protect marine and ocean environments, and in particular the IPOS initiative, through the development of sponsorship.
