Smart Ocean/Smart Industries: Global scaling up of ocean and climate data collection by industry

Companies from a variety of sectors (e.g. shipping, oil and gas, fisheries, cruise ship tourism, and others) will contribute time and effort and the use of their vessels and platforms to undertake pilot efforts and develop the system to foster, improve, and expand industry efforts to collect data that: a) contributes to describing the status, trends and variability of ocean and atmosphere conditions and b) improves the understanding, modeling and forecasting of ocean ecosystems, resources, weather, climate variability and climate change. The WOC and participating companies will ensure that scientific community interaction with ocean industries is coordinated, efficient, cost effective and is integrated into national and international observing and science programs.

The Smart Ocean/Smart Industries program will create the comprehensive structure and process needed to organize industry partnerships with science to scale up the level of data collecting from ships and platforms of opportunity and expand the spatial and temporal extent of observations. The program will be developed in close collaboration with the national and international ocean science community.

The World Ocean Council (WOC) – the international, cross-sectoral industry leadership alliance on ocean sustainability – is uniquely positioned to establish the Smart Ocean/Smart Industries program.