2020 CONCORDIA ANNUAL SUMMIT

The Promise of our Ocean: What’s in Store for our Ocean Planet?

Main Stage

Programming Partner: The Fabien Cousteau Ocean Learning Center

Media Partner: The Independent

• Fabien Cousteau reminded the audience that the ocean constitutes the vast majority of living space on our planet and contains most of the planet’s biodiversity. Yet woefully little is known about our ocean world: we’ve explored less than 5% of this world. Ocean exploration gets much less attention than space exploration: we oftentimes invest a staggering 100 times more in the latter than the former. 
• From coral bleaching and the depletion of wild fish stock to climate change-related degradation, our ocean world is seeing significant destruction.
• PROTEUS™ will perhaps be the most ambitious oceanic undertaking of our time. Currently at 36 months to installation, PROTEUS™ will be a totally underwater research station out of which aquanauts can live and work. With a total budget of $134 million—which will cover not only the building of the habitat but also several years of exploration—PROTEUS™ proves a highly cost-effective project. PROTEUS™, whose internal footage will far exceed that of past undersea habitats, will be spacious enough to have sensor arrays and a submarine docking station—two aspects previous habitats lacked.

“For those of us who are conservationists, it [PROTEUS™] gives us a better way to make real-time decisions that invest in the future of our children so that we can give back to them what we’ve taken for granted,” Fabien Cousteau