Ocean Conference Series
Endorsed as a UN Ocean Decade Activity
Online dialogues and live events make up the Ocean Conference Series, raising awareness about the UN Decade for Ocean Science among civil society, business and political representatives, showcasing organizations working to meet the ten challenges the decade aims to overcome.
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Ocean Forum 2025
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Ocean Decade Dialogue 15 May 2025
The UN Ocean Decade Challenge 1: Pollution in the Baltic - putting the focus on identification, reduction and removal -
Ocean Decade Dialogue 12 November 2025
The UN Ocean Decade Challenge 2: Legal tools to protect marine ecosystems and biodiversity
Ocean Decade Dialogue - 12 November 2025
The second dialogue of the year focused on Decade Challenge number 2, the question of how solutions for the protection, management, and restoration of ecosystems and their biological diversity can be developed under changing ecological, social, and climatic conditions. Anna von Rebay and Michelle Bender, two outstanding lawyers who use their legal expertise to protect the oceans, discussed the illegality of bottom trawling in EU waters and the growing movement to establish Ocean Rights.
Mr Frank Schweikert, German Ocean Foundation
Welcome
Anna von Rebay, CEO, Ocean Vision Legal
Anna represents clients in national and international courts and works on developing innovative legal approaches that take into account both the intrinsic value of nature and traditional value systems. She is involved in litigation against bottom trawling and deep-sea mining, as well as lawsuits against violations of the human right to a healthy environment through whaling or marine pollution. A particular focus of Anna's work is the judicial enforcement of EU environmental law in marine protected areas – the topic of her presentation is “Trawling the limits: The legality of bottom fishing in the EU.”
Michelle Bender, Legal Advisor and Head of Marine Rights at Ocean Vision Legal
Michelle is the founder and leading expert of the Ocean Rights movement, an ecocentric framework for protecting and restoring the health of the ocean that challenges the status quo of Western legal systems. In her presentation, Michelle focused on how important it is to create legal personality for the ocean in order to protect it.
Ocean Decade Dialogue - 15 May 2025
Looking at the first challenge of the UN Decade for Ocean Science - to understand and map land and sea-based sources of pollutants and contaminants and their potential impacts on human health and ocean ecosystems and develop solutions to remove or mitigate them - with a particular spotlight on the Baltic Sea.
Mr Frank Schweikert, German Ocean Foundation
Welcome
Ms Susanna Kaasinen, HELCOM
Susanna will present HELCOM's Actions for a healthy Baltic Sea: Towards a common goal, looking to achieve good environmental status for the sea basin, including measures to reduce nutrient inputs, improve biodiversity, and decrease maritime incidents.
Dr Patrick Wetzel, SeaTerra GmbH
After a brief introduction to unexploded and dumped munition in German waters, Patrick will focus on the German immediate action program for munitions waste, a unique commercial pilot clearance project, designed to fast-track the development of an environmentally sound, safe and efficient process chain for the clearance and subsequent disposal of unexploded ordnance at sea. SeaTerra was one of the major contractors of phase one of the project, which was successfully completed by the end of 2024.
Ocean Forum 2025 - 21 January 2025
The German Ocean Foundation's Ocean Forum takes place annually on the Water Pixel World stage of the "love your ocean" area. At the Ocean Forum 2025, representatives from universities, NGOs and researchers spoke on topics such as deep-sea mining, ocean literacy, octopus intelligence and European marine policy.
This year's programme included 11 presentations. We heard a call from Emily Penn, ambassador of the "love your ocean" sustainability initiative, for us all to find our superpowers in the fight against marine plastic pollution, about the Greenpeace campaign against deep sea mining, the Cool Blue Baltic project to establish marine gardens, Mare Mundi's research on the intelligence of octopuses in Croatia, ECOP Africa's ocean literacy projects, H2Org's revolutionary wastewater system that can simultaneously clean wastewater, reduce carbon dioxide and produce hydrogen, the German Ocean Foundation's Citizen Science project, which calls on water sports enthusiasts to collect temperature data in coastal areas, Aarhus University's research into the hidden powers of cable bacteria, the Senckenberg Ocean Species Alliance's goal of describing marine life before we lose it, the work of the Paul Ricard Oceanographic Institute in France and Frank Schweikert's work in the European Union's Mission Council to restore our oceans and waters.
