Ocean Program
Repository for the Ocean Program at the Open Earth Foundation.
Overview
Open Earth Foundation launched its Ocean Program to build the digital architecture needed to conserve 30% of the global ocean and solve the environmental problems that negatively affect it. The Ocean Program leverages the Foundation’s expertise in emerging digital technologies, including AI and blockchain, to scale marine conservation and outcome-based conservation finance.
Problem Statement
There exists few financial mechanisms to protect ocean health that scale up to what we need to do to conserve the ocean. Currently, many marine conservation efforts rely on philanthropy, which is not always scalable, or are turning towards carbon markets, which were not designed for ocean solutions and which focus primarily on climate. Efforts to protect the ocean and its ecosystems are however very important for a variety of ocean health metrics, such as marine biodiversity or marine pollution. Not only do these issues affect marine life, but they also affect human health, such as through seafood, for example.
Given the specificities of ocean systems and their complexities, we need to build adequate financial mechanisms for the protection and restoration of marine ecosystems.
To this end, we have yet to leverage the full potential of digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, big data and IoT to scale ocean conservation. The rise and maturity of these emerging technologies provide opportunities for existing (e.g. Regen) and new platforms to finance and scale ocean conservation.
Our Approach
Scaling marine conservation and results-based conservation financing by leveraging the Open Earth Foundation's expertise in emerging digital technologies, including AI and blockchain.
Specifically, we are working on a new class of marine ecosystem credits (MEC) that center around scientific integrity, equity and scalability (whitepaper here). We are building the digital infrastructure and developing protocols and methodologies to support these efforts.
In parallel, we are also developing free open-source tools to help lower the cost of environmental assessments in the ocean and to enable solutions to scale across vast swathes of the ocean.
Furthermore, we are researching and developing methodologies to apply Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) in the process of credit issuance and validation.
Our Pilot Plan
We are building a proof-of-concept through a pilot field experiment in partnership with Cocos Island National Park in Costa Rica (ACMC)
To develop a scalable system of marine biodiversity credits, we must first define what the credit unit is. Our goal is to build a “global scale” of marine biodiversity that is scientifically sound, that is equitable and that helps support the financial efforts going into conservation, meaning it must be scalable. We strive to create a metric that would include the ecological values of the ecosystems within the acreage—or 1
Content and Uses
Here you can find resources as:
- Open Ocean Whitepapers
- the methodologies we are testing for the creation of Marine Ecosystem Credits
If you want to learn more about the status of our work in the Marine Biodiversity Credit, please review our MBU Status Page
Repository Structure
Documentation: this folder contains useful documentation created for the project (maps, plots, papers, etc).Experimentation work: contains codes made to do tests of the functions.Extras: contains codes made to visualize other types of data.Marine Ecosystem Credits: contains a MBU methodology folder where are all the steps to assign Marine Biodiversity Credits
Contributing
Pull requests are welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change.
Please make sure to update tests as appropriate.
Our Team
- Maureen Fonseca (maureen@openearth.org)
- Ando Shah
- Martin Wainstein (martin@openearth.org)
- Louisa Durkin
- Paige Lewington
- Margaux Filippi
License
Question / Comments
To do
Repository
- set up the docs folder
- we need to add a proper .gitignore
- we need to add a proper license