OpenEarth: Oceans

The 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 to scale marine conservation and outcome-based conservation finance.

For more details about the Ocean Program please see the Foundation’s website.

What is the Open Earth Foundation?

The Open Earth Foundation is a California-based research and deployment non-profit developing open innovative technology to increase planetary resilience and avoid a catastrophic climate crisis.

We are a diverse international team, working with a network of collaborators and partners globally.

We are building open infrastructure for the Paris Agreement, energy finance, biodiversity tracking and impact solutions at the intersection of emergent technologies and climate innovations.

Digital Innovation to Protect the Ocean and its Ecosystems.

There exists few financial mechanisms to protect ocean health that scale up. 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.

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. our partners at Regen Network) and new platforms to finance and scale ocean conservation.

Scope of work

1. We are working on a new class of marine ecosystem credits that center around scientific integrity, equity and scalability. We are building the digital infrastructure and developing protocols and methodologies to support these efforts.
   • We are investigating how to apply Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) in the process of credit issuance and validation—exploring interoperability between Cosmos DIDs and Hyperledger DIDs. If you have experienced in this area and would like to contribute to our work, please reach out.
2. 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.

Repository

Like all of our programs, all our ocean research and work is open source. We will publish as much as we can. So far, we have only published example notebooks and code for ocean health monitoring.

This is a budding repository: the official program launch was January 31, 2022.

• Marine biodiversity
  • include normalized biodiversity score calculations
• Marine pollution & water quality
  • Eutrophication
    • An example of calculating the eutrophication index from Copernicus data can be found here Recreating the ICEP from Sarelli et al (2018) with CMEMS

Contact

Questions? Comments? Concerns?

We’re looking for passionate developers and marine ecologists to collaborate with code and knowledge to help create a global mechanism to scale ocean conservation.

Contact margaux@openearth.org if you’re interested.