From 11 to 13 September 2017, the Global Ocean Oxygen Network (GO2NE), a working group established by UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) in 2016, met for the second time at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Monterey, USA. The goal of the workshop was to further advance the Network’s efforts in providing a global and multidisciplinary view of deoxygenation, with a focus on understanding the full scale of the problem and offering scientific advice to policy makers to counter this concerning trend.

“A lot happened since GO2NE’s last meeting in 2016,” explained Kirsten Isensee, IOC Project Specialist. “The Network contributed to side events at the UNFCCC COP22 as well as organized a side event at the United Nations Ocean Conference, which helped to increase awareness among different stakeholders. Further capacity building activities, such as expert workshops and a summer school, are currently in the pipeline and will further help to build capacity among young scientists and senior researchers.”

The meeting touched on various questions related to the Network’s scientific work as well as outreach and capacity building, in particular the submitted voluntary commitment to the UN Ocean Conference OceanAction 15767, the upcoming international Ocean Deoxygenation Conference in September 2018 in Kiel, Germany, several scientific publications, and specific capacity development activities in 2019.

On the last day of the meeting, GO2NE was joined by a group of experts that focuses particularly on the Variability in the Oxycline and its ImpaCts on the Ecosystem (VOICE) to explore possibilities for joint actions in the upcoming years. The VOICE workshop continued its discussions on 14-15 September 2017.

A wide range of actions are planned for the upcoming years to raise awareness on current and future impacts of declining oxygen concentrations on ocean and human health. For more information, please check regularly GO2NE and ocean-oxygen.org.

For more information, please contact:

Kirsten Isensee (k.isensee(at)unesco.org)

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IOC working group – Global Ocean Oxygen Network, 11-13 September 2017, Monterey, USA: upper row – Mike Roman, Marilaure Gregoire(co-chair), Veronique Garçon, Kirsten Isensee, Moriaki Yasuhara, Wjih Naqvi; middle row – Grant Pitcher, Damodar Shenoy, Denis Gilbert, Maciej Telszewski, Dimitri Gutierrez, Denise Breitburg (co-chair), Ivonne Montes, Andreas Oschlies, Nancy Rabalais; lower row – Lisa Levin, Karin Limburg, Francisco Chavez, Gil Jacinto, Kenneth Rose.