EU to invest $107M to expand ocean monitoring
BRUSSELS — With underwater drones and ocean-focused satellites, the EU is expanding its monitoring network of Earth’s seas as climate change fuels heat waves and stronger storms and the Trump administration plans severe cuts to a similar system in the United States.
With an investment package of $107 million called OceanEye announced on Wednesday, the EU will be able to take the helm of global efforts to explore the depths of the planet’s vast oceans, said Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission.
Oceans are vital ecosystems covering about 70% of planet Earth, hosting complex webs of life that generate oxygen and absorb greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. Temperatures have risen in oceans faster due to climate change, super-charging storms and drought, ravaging coral reefs across the world, and endangering species in tandem with overfishing and industrial pollution.
Scientists estimate climate change will increase the strength of heat waves and severe storms across Europe.
Monitoring the ocean can help protect it by showing damage and threats to ecosystems that help inform regulations aimed at preventing species loss.
“This is about using science and good governance to understand our ocean and secure our future,” von der Leyen said.
In May, officials in the U.S. began signaling plans to gut its Ocean Observatories Initiative — a network of more than 900 ocean sensors built at a cost of $386 million that has continuously collected real-time data for more than a decade.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the observatories have tracked everything from ocean circulation and marine ecosystems to climate change and extreme weather. Its data has been freely available and has informed more than 500 scientific publications. The project was slated to run for another 15 to 20 years.
The EU investment was already in the pipeline when the U.S. cuts were announced.
International efforts are organized through the Global Ocean Observing System. The U.S. collects more than half of this data while Europe does about a quarter, followed by Japan, Australia, India and China.
“Europe needs to do more,” said Pierre-Yves Le Traon, an oceanographer and scientific director of the Mercator Ocean International based in Toulouse, France.
By 2035, the EU hopes to cover 35% of Earth’s maritime monitoring network and become the globe’s leading provider of “ocean intelligence.”
Robotic sensors in underwater and in orbit feed information to organizations like shipping companies, fisheries, emergency services and research institutions like the Mercator Ocean Institute that is building a virtual-reality mock-up of Earth’s oceans to be updated in real time called the Digital Twin Ocean.
That data is crucial to understanding and adapting to climate change and to a vast array of industries on land and at sea like aquaculture, shipping especially through icy waters, coastal tourism, agriculture and even navies, Le Traon said.
“Knowledge is essential if we want to manage the ocean,” Le Traon said. “We really have to be very active for the monitoring and protecting of the ocean because the ocean matters to everyone: for life at sea, for life on Earth.”