Projects and initiatives
Coalitions and groups HUB Ocean leads or takes part in, to unlock and share ocean data.
The Ocean Data Action Coalition
HUB Ocean, Microsoft and Accenture are leading the Ocean Data Action Coalition.
The vision is a globally shared data revolution that will contribute to sustainable ocean management worldwide.
Building a sustainable ocean economy is one of the most important tasks and greatest opportunities of our time.
This will only be realized if the private sector, governments and researchers join forces.
Background
The Ocean Data Action Coalition is an initiative from The High-Level Panel for Sustainable Ocean Economy (Ocean Panel), which consists of 19 countries. In December 2020, HUB Ocean (then C4IR Ocean) responded to the call from the High-Level Panel to take on the leadership of the ODAC, in collaboration with Microsoft Corporation. In 2024, Accenture joined ODAC.
- 19countries make up the Ocean Panel
- 50%+of the world’s coastlines are controlled by its members
- 45%of the world’s exclusive economic zones (EEZs)
Challenges
To make the Ocean Panel’s vision a reality, we will strive to:
Build solutions to overcome technological and human barriers to ocean data sharing.
Despite broad intentions to share ocean data, much data remains locked away in silos - sitting on computers, in national ocean data centres, and in publicly available but difficult-to-access online data repositories.
Advance industry sustainability through new business models that include ocean data sharing
To date, a vast majority of ocean data collection has been funded and managed by public sources.
Cultivate the regulatory and policy incentives for ocean data sharing
Frequently, data sharing is inhibited or prohibited by governance, regulation, and policies.
Status
- ODAC is active in participating in COPs, organizing and inviting to informal roundtables and other events.
- In 2024, we invited to the Ocean Data Action Day - a 360 degree perspective on Industrial Ocean Data Sharing.
- In parallel, ODAC encourages companies to make real commitments to ocean data sharing.
- ODAC also published the report “Tides of Transparency: A First Global Mapping of Industrial Ocean Data Sharing”, focusing on biodiversity data. Read the news →
HUB Ocean is a member of the Ocean Decade Corporate Data Group
Unlocking privately-held ocean data for the benefit of science.
The Corporate Data Group was established jointly by Fugro and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOC), in its role as coordinator of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development 2021-2030. Its goal is to establish strategies and best practices for private sector organisations to provide public access to their privately-owned ocean data.
The Corporate Data Group has already made a great contribution to the Decade, unlocking industrial data and pushing it to flagship repositories like OBIS, GBIF and EMODnet.
GuidelineBathymetry Data Sharing GuidelineRead the guideline
GuidelineMarine Megafauna Data Sharing GuidelineRead the guideline In 2024, HUB Ocean carried out the first ever mapping of the state of industrial data sharing. We found that only 3% of the data in public biodiversity repositories comes from industry. That is a huge untapped potential to get industry to contribute to the scientific mapping of our ocean.
Nature positive initiatives
These are types of initiatives that HUB Ocean supports through real world use cases with our private sector partners.
Let’s build it together
Bring us the challenge you’re stuck on. We bring the platform and the partners to work on it with you.