International Ocean Conferences: ENSTA researchers contribute to knowledge sharing

There's only one ocean 

A resource essential to humanity's prosperity and well-being, the ocean plays a crucial role in climate regulation and in the livelihoods of three billion people, the vast majority of whom live in developing countries. 

Climate change, overfishing, pollution and conflicts over use - the ocean is threatened by a combination of pressures. It urgently needs decisive, rapid and unified efforts to address its critical situation and maximize the solutions it offers.  

Preserving the ocean, a central issue at the OOSC scientific congress and the UNOC3 United Nations Ocean Conference .  

The third United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC3) will be held in Nice from June 9 to 13, 2025. All the players involved - scientists, the business world, associations and political decision-makers - will come together to initiate and deploy concrete actions for the “conservation and sustainable use of marine and coastal ecosystems”, in line with the UN's 14th Sustainable Development Goal (SDG14), which is the least funded of all the SDGs. 

In advance of and in support of this meeting, CNRS and Ifremer - along with their partners, including ENSTA - have been tasked with organizing the One Ocean Science Congress (OOSC) in Nice from June 3 to 6, 2025, dedicated to providing heads of state and government, as well as society as a whole, with comprehensive scientific information on the health of the ocean and its future trajectory. Science-based decisions should enable the conservation and sustainable use of the ocean, optimize the solutions it offers, and safeguard the services and benefits it provides to humanity. 

Matthieu, Laurent, what are the objectives of your work at OOSC? 

• Matthieu Sacher (Professor in mechanical sciences, hydrodynamics and marine engineering, he teaches naval architecture. He will be speaking at the OOSC on June 5):  
  "The dynamism of multidisciplinary scientific networks is a prerequisite for high-performance applied research, which will be able to deliver the knowledge and innovative capabilities expected more rapidly. I'm taking advantage of OOSC to pass on this message and illustrate it with a few research projects that we're carrying out with colleagues from other engineering schools and research laboratories to decarbonize maritime transport".
   
• Laurent Mortier (Professor in oceanography, he teaches ocean dynamics and is actively involved in the development of the Global Ocean Observing System) : 
  "In situ ocean observation relies on a large number of players, including researchers with diverse motivations, and coordinating their activities remains a complex issue involving significant costs. Halfway through the Decade of Ocean Science, the OOSC provides an appropriate framework for making progress on the issue of research infrastructures. Their role in consolidating and sustaining the ocean observation system is now better recognized, but raises the issue of sharing resources and coordinating them with operational agencies. An OOSC session is devoted to this issue, as is a "townhall", in which my European colleagues and I are giving presentations, and I'm moderating." 

Laurent, what are the main scientific orientations and objectives for ocean observation, from the deep ocean to the coasts?  

"In many ways, ocean observation is the foundation of today's climate observation organization.

While we observe in order to discover - the exploration of the unknown always concentrates the same forces - and understand phenomena, we need to collect data in a highly systematic way to help societies and economies cope with hazards, climate change and the necessary exploitation and preservation of resources.

From the deep seas - there is much talk today of their mineral exploitation - to the coasts - half the world's population lives within a few dozen kilometers of the seashore, and the EEZ concentrates a very large proportion of exploited resources - in-situ observation, complemented by the integrated but partial vision of satellites, enables us to understand the extremely complex interactions between these environments, from physical processes to marine ecosystems that have always fascinated mathematicians. But it also enables us to create indicators that can be used for maritime policies, to manage fishing licenses, to combat illegal activities and so on.

The aim today is to stabilize the operation of the many ocean observation systems, to better coordinate them and, above all, to improve their efficiency, as their costs are very high _ or relatively modest compared to the benefits of these observations and knowledge.

Laurent, how do you approach these issues in your work as a teacher-researcher?  

As a scientist, I first tried to make people understand the absolute necessity of observation, whereas the role of modeling - and the engineers at our schools excel in this area - has tended to overshadow it a little too much, at least in France. Every year, we take students from the ENSTA Paris-Saclay campus on oceanographic expeditions in the Mediterranean, and they come back transformed. This is also one of the areas of expertise (hydrography and oceanography cat. A) on the ENSTA Brest campus.

For the OOSC and the UNOC, the ECOPs as they are called - Early Carrier Ocean Professionals - are an absolute priority. But it's true that I've been a research infrastructure activist for almost 20 years. EU funding programs have stimulated the construction of an ecosystem of infrastructures that play a central role in Europe, to organize the means of observation at sea in particular, and which by domino effect one might say, also structures the organization on a national level, and increasingly on a global level. I started with the question of automated observation by drones. This is an important trend, as observation by research vessels has many limitations, not to mention the need for decarbonization, which is prompting us to review the complementarity of observation resources.