The Marion Dufresne off the “port” of Crozet. East Island in the background. Photo by Dimitri Damasceno, Wikimedia Commons.
World Oceans Day (WOD), the initiative proposed in 1992 by Canada at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and officially recognized by the UN in 2008, aims to catalyze collective action for a healthy ocean and a stable climate.
Daniel Pauly, Anna Luna Rossi and Fabrice Teletchea at the 2025 International Congress on Aquatic Sciences in Saint Pierre and Miquelon. Photo by Studio Briand Photographe | Archipel Développement.
The Sea Around Us principal investigator, Dr. Daniel Pauly, and master’s student, Anna Luna Rossi, made a splash in Saint Pierre and Miquelon by participating in the fifth edition of the International Congress on Aquatic Sciences, which took place from September 28th to October 2nd, 2025.
The congress was structured around four main themes—fishing and aquaculture, citizen science and education, aquatic biodiversity, and maritime transport —and hosted 48 presentations, all of them meant to foster exchanges between researchers, businesses, and citizens, with a particular focus on young people.
Tiger Shark. Image by Kevin Bryant, Flickr.
By Daniel Pauly.
From August 17 to 23, I was in the village of Alpbach in the Austrian Alps, which is, since September 1945 (!), home to an annual gathering of scientists, politicians and other personalities whose mission is to think about European unity, and to make it stronger.
The ‘European Forum Alpbach’ (EFA), as this event is now called, also includes a week during which about 500 people (selected from over 7000 applicants) from European and other countries – PhD students, postdocs, NGO leaders and others – join different seminars to study various topics pertinent to European economic or scientific policies.
The Sea Around Us MSc student, Anna Luna Rossi (fourth from the left), with her NGO Reserva colleagues and actress Auli’i Cravalho at UNOC 2025.
By Anna Luna Rossi.
June 2025 marked the third edition of the United Nations Ocean Conference, hosted in Nice, France, and co-organized by France and Costa Rica. UNOC3 falls within the Ocean Decade initiative to create a framework for communicating and using ocean knowledge to generate real-time actions for safeguarding our marine resources.
French President Emmanuel Macron, being interviewed at UNOC 2025. Image by France.TV.
During an interview with French national television, President Emmanuel Macron was confronted with images from David Attenborough’s Ocean documentary, which shows the gigantic nets of bottom trawlers operating in the Mediterranean dropping hundreds of tonnes of all kinds of fishes on a boat after razing the seafloor and everything in their way.