Speaker Notes: Ocean Recovery Online Conference – An Introduction
Bob Earll
CMS E: bob.earll@coastms.co.uk
In 2019 Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion and host of natural extreme events had raised the awareness of the Climate Emergency to an unprecedented scale. The growing scale of man’s activities on the planet, the climate emergency and huge impacts on biodiversity was increasingly recognised. At the Coastal Futures conference in January 2020 many of the speakers highlighted that 2020 would be the Year of the Ocean. A tidal wave of reports were produced early in the year for a wide variety of international meetings that were intended to galvanise action plans. The culmination of this was to be the Glasgow COP26 Summit where leaders were to be asked to do more on climate change. And then came Covid, and we all got to experience first-hand what a massive planet wide catastrophe looks like for real.
During 2020 disruptive innovation has come of age for many organisations, not least with digital meetings. I started talking to Roger Proudfoot in April since one of the early casualties of Covid was his REACH conference scheduled for July. The REACH conference in 2019 had pulled together an impressive array of people working on restoration and recovery in practice in UK and around the world. As we talked through various ideas it seemed a perfect fit to include the wider context of an array of international initiatives with practical examples – and so it has worked out. In discussing our ideas in the summer with some of our long-standing sponsors, Sarah Young who is leading WWF-UK –Sky Ocean Recovery, joined us in the organising team. The six keynotes, 15 sessions and over 60 presentations cover this forward looking agenda. The conference not only sets out ideas but what we need to do to realise them.
We know what to do and we have a decade to do it. We hope that the conference will inspire you to do more.