Digital Ocean Forum 2024

Society's expectations

The ocean covers over 70% of our planet, making all life on Earth possible. From warming, to acidification, to pollution, the ocean is faced with a multitude of intensifying threats that endanger both the Earth’s natural systems and human well-being. Understanding and predicting these changes is crucial to protecting and preserving the ocean and its valuable resources for future generations. The European Union, under its Mission “Restore our Ocean and Waters”, launched the European Digital Twin Ocean — building a digital replica of marine and coastal environments — to help us better understand and predict the impacts of human pressures and climate change for better actions and solutions.


John BELL

Director of Heathy Planet - DG Research and Innovation 

“Our understanding of the ocean is central to our understanding of our own prospects as a society and our economies. To understand the ocean, we need new infrastructure, new intelligence, new ways of understanding the dynamics in the ocean so that real people in real places in Europe and elsewhere can make real decisions that will affect their lives, their economies and their futures.”

Kestutis SADAUSKAS

Deputy Director-General of the DG for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries 

“The global vision of the digital twin of the ocean that is being developed by European Commission as well as by many other partners, is to bring together all the data and all the stakeholders, all the users about marine science and marine knowledge. The idea here is indeed to bring the fragmented pieces into one place, to bring it fast, to make it usable, and to make it accessible and available to everybody who needs to use all that data.” 

Richard MUNANG

United Nations Environment Programme - Head of Global Environment Monitoring Systems 

“With the advent of artificial intelligence, the new approach of digital twinning is very instrumental. This innovation can be leveraged to extrapolate and interpolate data to have an understanding of the entire ocean, including shorelines, the coastlines, and sea beds. Contributing to monitoring of the state of the ocean and the marine environment, this will also be big an opportunity to help decision makers know what to do.”

Pierre Bahurel

Mercator Ocean International

"The Goal of the Digital Twin Ocean is to build a digital replica of the Ocean, so we can bring together everything we know and share with everyone… the connexion with science is fundamental... And the first source is to build the fundations thanks to the two flagship programs that are EMODnet and Copernicus Marine Service… and these massive Investments are key to deliver something which at the end is performant and open access to everyone"