Forbes Philanthropy Summit: The Future of Our Oceans | Salesforce

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome san francisco bureau chief forbes.

Miguel helft, executive director, benioff ocean initiative, university of california, santa barbara Dr. Douglas mccauley, executive director, monterey bay aquarium julie packard, chief executive officer and founder, the ocean cleanup, boyan slot, ocean's chair, world.

Economic forum, nishan degnarane. Thank you very much for joining us. And thank you to our panelists for leading the discussion today. I want to start by asking each of you to help set the stage for the conversation. Give us your take, your assessment of the condition of our oceans and why we should care about them. So, Doug, why don't you start?

Absolutely. Thank you, Miguel. I think that's a great place to start. Why should we care about them? Importantly, why should we be talking about the oceans at a tech conference? Why have this conversation with a group of leaders, innovators, people who have a lot of creative skills to do something? Why should we direct some of that talent to the oceans? So I think there's a lot of wonderful reasons why there is a good reason to do that. A lot of diverse values that I think make the oceans important to look after. So the first of these values that's really important to me and is just sort of a personal connection to our oceans and wonderful thing about the oceans is we all connected them in our own way. What I love about the oceans is this feeling of wonder that you get by interacting with them. That's why I became a marine biologist. The sensation that you get when you go scuba diving. And you guys, anyone who's here, who's a diver or a snorkeler or goes to the beach knows what I'm talking about. The sensation you get for me when I'm diving, that around the corner could come the biggest animal that's ever lived on our planet, a blue whale, right? Or I might bump into the oldest animal that's ever lived on our planet or oldest animal that's alive now on our planet. A black or something that could come around a corner that scares the heck out of me, right? Or something that's so beautiful it makes me want to cry in my mask. A manta ray or turtle or whatever it is, right? This sense of wonder and beauty, the sort of agedness, the ancient values of the ocean are a wonderful source of inspiration and really get me going. But it's not just about whales, right? I love them, but there's a lot of other important values that I think make it important for us to have this conversation here today. So one of the important values, beyond just the Inspiration that we get from the oceans. Is the value we get of the oceans as a resource, as a source of nutrition. So I, with colleagues at Harvard University of Washington, we sat down and tried to figure out what the value was of seafood that came into some of our communities. And we estimated that about 845 million people on our planet from seafood keep themselves just a hair away from diseases caused by malnutrition. Right. That's a wonderful value. The oceans essentially are this refrigerator full of free range wild food that's highly nutritious, that we get to access, and the fact that that's helping with the human nutrition, particularly in some of the poorest parts of our planet, matter and make the oceans extremely valuable to us. Another important value, of course, is the economic value of the oceans. The oceans are a source of millions of jobs, literally. Economists estimate the oceans as an asset are worth $24 trillion. If the ocean was a country, the ocean would have the seventh largest economy in the entire world. So there's clear value there. So we have the economic value, we have the value to human health. And then we also have that inspirational, that wonder, that recharge value you get from the oceans. What kinds of things, Miguel, as you mentioned, what kinds of things maybe threatening this wonderful repository of wealth and inspiration and health? Well, I'm sure we'll talk about a bunch of these things. One of those is climate change. Climate change impacting a whole lot of parts of our planet, definitely impacting our oceans. Right? And this is serious. Climate change is making our oceans more acidic. It's making them hotter, it's making them harder to breathe in. And you don't need a professor of marine biology to tell you that oceans that are more acidic, hotter and harder to breathe in, that, that just sucks for marine life. Right? And that's bad for us too. What I'm showing here is an image of sea level rise projections for San Francisco in the year 2100. During a bad day, we expect climate change initiated sea level rise to cause flooding that comes all the way into some of the deepest parts of the financial district in San Francisco. This is billion dollar real estate, right? And the same thing is affecting many parts already of coastal communities where we live. Another important emerging threat in the oceans is overfishing. Right. Overfishing is what controls or is a control on how much of that free range nutritious food we find in our ocean fridge. So overfishing unfortunately has impacted about a third of the fisheries on our planet. So that's serious, that's A serious threat to this food source. Another major threat and another major source of concern are emerging stressors to the oceans. We never, for example, used to mine in the oceans that just, it wasn't possible, there wasn't economic interest in that. Suddenly we're beginning with a lot of enthusiasm to explore mining in the oceans. Over a million square kilometers of the oceans have been gazetted in seabed mining claims. So this is something, a new challenge that we need to be, we'll need to be facing going forward as we manage and think about the oceans. Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, he described the feeling that a seaman gets as he's going out of the harbor on a boat as this kind of wonderful escape into a world of anonymity, that the oceans were so empty it was one of the last places on our planet where you could escape. This is a data slide that we produced with colleagues that show satellite sensed data from vessels around the global ocean. It's a data slide. It looks like a map, but it's indeed a data slide. The data is so dense from vessels traversing for all sorts of purposes our oceans that you reverse engineer the continental boundaries. Right. So our oceans are not so empty anymore. The grand challenge I think going forward is realizing we're going to be in the oceans more. We need more things from the oceans and yet we need to harm our oceans less.

I have one follow up question on this slide that represents the traffic over what people, period of time?

This is a single year. This is a single year. This is data from 2015 aggregated together. It's shipping, fishing, all the sort of transit in commerce that we do in the oceans. It just lights up all of our ocean basins.

Julie, you ran the Monterey Aquarium, which for those of us who don't scuba dive and go on big expeditions, you give us a taste of the wonderful things about the ocean. What's your view on what's happening with the state of our oceans today and why we should care about it?

Well, Hank, Doug's given an excellent summary, even though it's kind of a downer. Okay. I have the really fun job of working at a public aquarium. And our mission is inspire people to get fired up about learning about and protecting the ocean and restoring it for the future. So I'm actually going to pull up my first slide to get us in the happy space. Oh, not the Salesforce logo. That's a happy thing too. However, get us in the happy space of gazing at that beautiful jelly tank at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Hopefully many of you have had the opportunity to do that. So you might ask, how did I ever get interested in the ocean? Doug told his personal story. I might briefly tell mine. I actually am not technically a marine biologist. I actually studied botany in college because plants rock. I mean, I was so blown away at the whole idea when I was a kid that these things on the planet produce oxygen so we can breathe. I ended up studying marine algal ecology. And you're really lucky I'm not going to talk about that here much today, although it's really super cool and fascinating. But I grew up just a few miles from here down the peninsula, and grew up in a family that really valued science and nature. We spent a lot of time outdoors. My father grew up in Pueblo, Colorado. When he wasn't busy building Hewlett Packard, his favorite thing was to be driving a tractor out in our apricot orchard. We spent a lot of time outdoors and we didn't actually ever go to the beach. But our family value really was all about science and the environment. And in the 60s, my parents created a family foundation to give back to the community here, but also to start working on some larger issues. And environmental conservation was one of those, along with child health and global family planning and many other issues. Well, so a lot of great work was done during the period of the environmental movement. A lot of NGOs grew up, up and did a lot of important things. But after a while, we realized they were forgetting what I like to call the other three quarters of the planet. In essence, the part that creates half the oxygen we breathe, the part that drives world climate, the part that feeds a billion people with primary protein here on Earth. The ocean, where the vast majority of living space on this planet exists. The, the biggest biodiversity, the most life. No one was working on that very vital piece of really the human enterprise and what enables life to exist here on the ocean. So we created the Monterey Bay Aquarium. That was with a gift from my parents, and we've been on our own since then. And to anyone who's a member or donor to the aquarium, thank you for making all the wonderful things possible that, that we've been doing over the years. I realized quickly that displaying a jellyfish display like this was really hard. We wanted to show people what the ocean was really about. It's not about fish and dolphin shows, as you might have seen at another aquarium. It's about the huge diversity of other life forms. That was hard, but really the hardest thing at the aquarium was the animal on the dry side, the human species Keeping jellyfish is hard, and we brought a lot of amazing animals to the public. But the big challenge in terms of the future of the ocean is really about humans and figuring out what's going on in our brains and how we can motivate people to know about, care about, and act on behalf of the ocean. So in terms of the issues that Doug outlined, he's got it nailed. I mean, obviously, overfishing is a huge problem, and perhaps one of the ones it's most directly. It's a problem we created directly over not that much time. And we can fix it. We have the tools to fix it. And that's been a big focus of our family foundation and the aquarium. Carbon pollution and stemming climate change, obviously, is massive. And then pollution, of course, we'll hear about plastics, another huge issue. But also, we need to know more about the ocean. And after the aquarium opened, my father was really struck by the fact that we were so limited in the technology to understand what was going on in the ocean. Essentially, it being the last frontier, there was no place where dedicated teams of engineers could work side by side with scientists to develop technology for opening Understanding the sea. He founded the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, an ocean technology institute on the Monterey Bay. And you can see sort of a collage here. And I mean, there's so many cool, awesome, crazy animals in the deep sea that we've never seen. We might have taken a snapshot of them or dragged them up as a pile of mush in a net, but to see their behavior and how they function in the ecosystem is we're just scratching the surface. And that's really so important for us, understanding, you know, what a healthy ecosystem looks like. I'm sure we'll talk more about technology. There's some really awesome technology being developed. So after all of that, and through all of that and working with the public over all these years, we really set about at the Monterey Bay Aquarium to essentially redefine what a public aquarium can be and redefine it as a force for conservation. And so we've been putting a lot of energy into how consumers can turn around this problem of global overfishing. Overfishing. Right now, the majority of our current fish stocks are being fished at or beyond capacity. We have the tools to do it right. Hopefully many of you have our seafood watch app. If you don't, I hope you download it. And this is an entire movement that's been going on over the last 10 years that enable consumers to get information about the seafood you're buying in your restaurant or to bring home science based information about where that seafood comes from, what the status is in terms of sustainability. And so you can vote with your wallet. And in turn that's influencing big players. In the US we import 90% of the seafood we eat. We have a lot of great fish in US waters. We don't really eat them so much. We love farm salmon and farm shrimp. Those are the two biggest things.

That.

People in the US like to eat. Those products have a lot of impacts. Aquaculture is not sustainable yet. The good news is Seafood Watch, working with these NGOs and in partnership with big, big buyers, we now have 85% of the big retailers in the US have made time bound sustainable seafood commitments to bring their seafood into compliance with sustainability standards over time. So main message, you know, we're turning it around, everyone to get involved. But consumer choice can make a big difference all the way up to the big businesses that are essentially driving the global seafood market. And in turn then we're looking to lock that into government change to make those policies there for the long term.

Great. Thank you, Julie. I think we're all somewhat aware that there's garbage in the ocean. Boyan, this is your specialty. Talk to us about this. And I think you want to start with a video.

Sure, yeah. You can play that.

Can we please roll the.

The plastic pollution problem has always been portrayed as something that is unsolvable. The story has always been, okay, we can't clean it up, so the best thing we can do is not make it worse. To me, that's a very uninspiring message.

He has devised the first real plan to try to clean things up.

What we're doing here now has never been done before.

He wants to build the largest building floating barrier ever deployed.

What I really hope is that the ocean cleanup in this century can be a symbol for us using technology to actually make things better. All right, so yeah, at the ocean cleanup, we work on ocean plastic and specifically in an area where, at least when I started, nobody was really focusing on, which is sort of dealing with this, the 50 to 60 years of pollution that has already accumulated in these areas. And there are really five areas in the world where this plastic concentrates. They're called subtropical gyres. The most infamous one is right here around the corner. It's what they call the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, halfway between Hawaii and California, where about a third of all plastics of all seas and oceans is concentrated. And there are really three issues with that. One is economic. So According to the UN there's about $13 billion of damage being done by the plastic pollution. The second one is environmental. So there's this entanglement, ingestion, et cetera, damaging the ecosystems. There are currently about 100 species that are threatened with extinction that are already negatively affected by this plastic pollution. And thirdly, what happens is that chemicals in very low concentrations in the oceans, they attach to that plastic, and then when that plastic is consumed by sea life, those chemicals also end up in the food chain, and that's a food web that includes us humans as well. And actually, there's something here in my pocket. This is not trying to imitate Steve Jobs here, but here we go. So this is actually a bag with microplastics. And I must say that the contents of this bag actually came out of the stomach of one sea turtle found dead in Uruguay two months ago. So as you can imagine, this is probably not something you would like to have in your stomach. And now the thing is that these small pieces, they used to be big objects when they entered the oceans a long time ago. And what we found last year when we were mapping this patch in the North Pacific with these 30 vessels at the same time, was that right now, actually, most of the mass of the plastic is still in those large objects. So what you see on the right is what people knew was out there. And what you see on the left is sort of this newly discovered large debris, which of course, over the next few decades will also become those very hazardous microplastics if we don't clean it up. So hence, we once described it as sort of a ticking time bomb. The sooner we clean it up, I think on one side, of course, it's persistent, so it doesn't go away by itself. And on the other side, it gets more harmful and also more difficult to clean up over time. So the ocean cleanup, of course, reconnaissance is part of it. So right now we have this aircraft doing low altitude flights across the patch this week to really see how much of this plastic is out there to clean up, which is interesting, important for our technological development as design input. But on the other side, we of course work on the technology. I mean, this is a picture from recent prototype deployment in the north sea. So it's 100 meters and now really making the final preparations before we deploy the first real operational system that should actually be collecting plastic on the large scale probably around the end of next year. So, yeah, so that's where we're now working towards.

You mentioned the Garbage Patch, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. That's the right name.

Yeah, that's what people usually call it, I think.

Give us a sense of the scale.

Yeah, I think, actually, I was thinking about this. Perhaps a more accurate term of it would be like debris field, but it's sort of less catchy. But how big is it? Yeah, I mean, it's an area. There's no true sort of edge. It's hard to say, to give, like, an exact figure, but roughly, if you give an estimate, between 1 million and 3 million square kilometers. So it's quite a big area. Like the US analogy some people have used is twice the size of Texas. The. The size of this accumulation area and.

How dense is the garbage.

Yeah, that's, of course, the point. It's not an island of that size. So what we find is that, I mean, people used to think it was an island then. People. Then after scientists took the first measurements, that was reduced to sort of the idea of the plastic soup. So all these small fragments floating out there. And now what we're seeing, while really focusing our research on the more of the larger debris, is that actually the truth is somewhere in the middle. So I think in terms of concentrations, I think we're getting to, like, hundreds of pounds per square mile, which is high, but of course, not enough to walk on. So really, the key of the cleanup technology that we're pursuing is to concentrate the plastic further first before we take it out, because otherwise it would take a very long time, about 79,000 years to skim that area.

We'll get into the details in a moment. Nishan, you're with the World Economic Forum. You work with governments, with business. What are your concerns about the oceans? What is your assessment of the state of the needs they have?

Sure.

Well, both the concerns and opportunities. But maybe I can start by asking a question to the audience. How many of you here have swum in the oceans in the last 12 months? Just raise your hands. Okay, terrific. So that's about 90% of you. So that gives me hope at the moment, because where I believe some of the opportunities lie in the oceans is exactly as Boyan mentioned, some of the new technologies that we're starting to see and the disruptive mindsets around oceans. And being around here in the Bay Area, seeing so many of you swim in the oceans give us hope that there are those with that strong connection to the oceans. So, Miguel, to answer to your question, at the World Economic Forum, we work with many of the leading governments and companies in the world, and we look at oceans in a historical context. We see Right now, the oceans at the confluence of about three large inflection points. On the one hand, there's growing demand on our oceans. As we start to develop economically, we're starting to see 3 billion extra middle classes enter the world from particularly from Southeast Asia. That's going to have a large impact in terms of demand, in terms of consumption. The second aspect is around the system, the biosphere of the oceans. It's a system under duress. We talked a little bit about seafood, so 80% of our fisheries have been exploited to a greater or lesser extent, some irrevocably. There are going to be demands, whether it's offshore energy, oil, gas or sustainable energy. But we do need to look at that system as a biosphere under duress and manage some of the demand that we're seeing. And the third, which is where I think the greatest opportunity of hope could be, is what we're calling at the World Economic Forum, the fourth Industrial Revolution. And if I just show you a slide here for context, What we mean by the fourth Industrial Revolution is right now we're seeing many technologies that are accelerating our use. So it's not just digital technologies, it's new sensors, whether it's satellite sensors, it's revolutions, whether it's in biology, with genetics, new materials, in a post plastics world. But we're going through a period of rapid acceleration. But the world has been in this period of rapid acceleration in the past. So in the modern era, we talk about the fourth Industrial Revolution. And this is a piece of work that we've worked together with Doug on. When we've moved from sail to steam, there's been a greater use of our oceans. We've moved into the oil era, and recently we moved into a electronics era in the 70s and 80s. And so with each new technological revolution, it's allowed us to go deeper and further into the oceans, become much more extractive with our oceans. And so where we are right now, on this cusp of this new Industrial revolution, and we heard a little bit from Doug on seabed mining, from Julie, about how we're using seafood, we really have a leadership challenge ahead of us. We have technology which is out there, which technology will allow us to go further and deeper and more extractive. But at the same time, we have a leadership opportunity to tip technology and use technology to manage our resources much more sustainably. So I think my question or my challenge, I think for the world is how do we use this as an opportunity? How do we use technology as an opportunity? And we talk about the Fourth industrial Revolution. This is more than just technology and engineering, which many of you obviously are strong masters on. This is about new business models as well. It's not just about having the right technology, but how can that be used sustainably, that can expand. It's also about leadership, new models of leadership. With each of the new industrial revolutions we've talked about in the past, there have been steps of leadership. Whether it's been previously on the abolition of slavery, the human rights movement, the animal rights movement, there have been new movements and models of leadership. So the question and challenge for us now in this new era of this fourth industrial revolution, what are the new models of leadership? What are the new business models? What are the new technologies that will allow us in this world of 10 billion extra people in the world and 3 billion extra middle classes to use our oceans in a much more sustainable manner?

Isn't one of the issues when you're trying to address this on a global scale? Who has jurisdiction over these oceans? Right. I mean, they don't belong to anybody. They belong to all of us.

Correct. And so that's actually fascinating. So about half our world's surface, about 45% of the world, is what's called the high seas. And so this is areas beyond national jurisdiction. So just so you know, countries can govern about 200 kilometers, 200 miles outside of their coastal areas, but the vast majority of our oceans has no national jurisdiction. And so that raises real questions about how we govern our commons. And that's why we need new models of leadership. So there's no single body that govern this piece of ocean, and yet we have plastics in our ocean, or we have most of our tuna, actually, tuna that's caught in the high seas. And yet we're depleting those resources. And so we need new models of public private collaboration, possibly using technology, satellite, big data, AI, machine to machine, that could start to administer some of the, some of the oceans. And so where we are in the world right now, these are the new governance models as we start to enter a world where we have to reduce the impacts of climate change that we need to start exploring. And for me, that's where I believe some of the most exciting developments may lie in the next few years.

Before I jump into what each of you is doing, we've heard a lot about sort of threats. There's garbage, there's fisheries, climate change, acidification, mining. Are these connected in any way or are we talking about individual threats? Threats that need individual solutions?

I'm sure Doug has more to say about I mean, they're, of course, absolutely connected. I mean, the climate impacts are sort of the umbrella threat to everything altogether. But one of the reasons that a lot of the advocates and governments have been working to set up marine protected areas is just around the idea of. Of having some parts of the ocean that can be unperturbed. And you know, because of these connections. And for example, these highly migratory fishes like tunas, we love to eat the top predators. We're fishing them out. The Pacific bluefin tuna is now at less than 3% of its. Of its level when we began fishing. And, you know, stripping that out of the ecosystem is having effect that go way beyond just whether we like to eat tuna or not. Certainly all the effects on the coral reefs. A lot of food fish depend on the coral reefs. The coral reefs are bleaching because of ocean warming and acidification. So it's clearly. There are myriad stories, I'm sure, that Doug and others could tell about the connections, but they're absolutely connected.

I would just second what you've laid out for us, Julie, that an interesting thing is here at Dreamforce is perhaps the only other conference I go to where I hear ecosystem constantly mentioned different kind of ecosystem than the marine ecosystems in the context I normally think of. But it is truly an interconnected system, the oceans. And so you have. I mean, it's like a grand fish bowl, right, where if you're acidifying the oceans, that is one source of stressor. If you have fish, turtles, other members of these ecosystems that are ingesting plastic, that's all happening in the same bowl. We have to worry about what we're removing from the. From the oceans through overfishing. And so it's perhaps more connected than any other part of the planet, just simply because it's all in this hyperconnected fluid, which is. It makes things more challenging and that all these stressors are coming at these organisms, these ecosystems from different directions, and they're all sort of centering in. But it also makes kind of an interesting and exciting opportunity. Another brand of connectivity and opportunity here is that I think just as the stressors are connected and the system itself is connected, there's some wonderful connections to make that we've all already started highlighting that you, I, people on the stage here can do to help give the oceans a bit of a break, right? So technology bred in with science, bred in with what Julie does, which is inspiration and showcasing science and showcasing the biodiversity of it, is so amazing in the oceans. That's another kind of connectivity, I think that is very germane to this discussion will be an important part of this solution and certainly something that you're all a part of by just listening or using your own tools to come together in this network of change.

So this is a good jumping off point to go a little deeper. So we're at Benioff's show here. You run the Benioff's Ocean Initiative. What is the initiative? What is the doing to address some of these issues?

So it's a really exciting thing and I'm just thrilled to be able to talk about that. So the Benioff Ocean Initiative is made possible through the generosity of Mark and Lynn. They made a gift to University of California Santa Barbara, which is where I'm home based of $10 million which let us create this, the Benioff Ocean Initiative. It's essentially like a hospital for the oceans, if you will. And it was inspired by. Inspired by the observation that a lot of us are kind of frustration from a lot of us in marine science and in ocean sciences, which is that we very intensely are on the front line of studying some of these problems, whatever it is, plastics or new industries in the oceans, acidification. We know these problems. We're using our scientific tool to describe them with increasingly high resolution. But there's not resources often on the table for scientists and scientific community to build build partnerships the kind that we just mentioned to start using what we know in science to make change. So it's sort of like a hospital or a cancer center you might find on a university. Right. It would be a disservice if this cancer center studied the biology of cancer but didn't use that science to try to fix and cure cancer, help cancer patients. What we're trying to do now with the Benioff Ocean Initiative and an exciting new model kind of experience experimental way is make marine science more than just doing science in the oceans, but applying science and scientists to fixing the oceans. Kind of the neat thing in terms of engagement is that we're launching the Benioff Ocean Initiative with the invitation with a crowd sourced campaign. So the agenda that we work on will be set by the world. We're asking people anywhere in the world to send us issues that bother them in the oceans. And normally if this was a marine biology class at UC Santa Barbara, I would tell you not to do this. But you are all very welcome. In fact, I would love it if you'd pull out your phones and jump on the Benioff Ocean Initiative Twitter page.

So let me understand. You want everybody who's in this room. Everybody who goes to the beach, everybody who's on a sailboat, what they notice garbage, they notice pollution, they notice that last week there were fish here and this week there are. And to get in touch and what precisely.

It doesn't have to be profound. It can be any of the things that you mentioned. If you walk in with your kids at a beach you love and you're bothered by the plastics, send the idea our way. If you read a story about shark finning that bugs you, send the idea in. If it's that you just don't want to see a dolphin, you know, we're looking down the, we're digging down the pipeline at maybe our first dolphin extinction in the ocean. So that bothers you. Send it our way. And what we'll do is how are.

You going to filter and deal with it?

Every idea that comes in will be reviewed by one of the marine scientists that's in the Benioff Ocean Initiative. And in every cycle we'll pick out an idea, we'll convene a group of marine scientists that are specialists on plastics or dolphins or acidification, whatever it is. They'll come together in a summit where they do what they normally do, study the heck out of these problems intensely, come up with a science solution for trying to fix this. But the difference is then we'll take a million dollars, put it on the table and use that science based solution to code the thing, build the thing, do whatever it takes to fix that problem. Whatever problems you guys submit to us.

And how are you, you just said before this, that this is a global interconnected problem. Are you going to take input from the coast of Africa and Chile and Asia and how are you going to collect that?

Well, the oceans are hyper, of course, hyper global, hyper interconnected. They are a common bond between everybody here and coast to coast. Right? So we're looking for ideas from truly anyone in the world. We have over 15 countries that in the first few days of Benioff Ocean Initiative have already sent in ideas. Costa Rica, the uk, Australia, Kiribati. And we'd love ideas from San Francisco, we'd love a poll ideas from anywhere in the world. And the idea here is that we want to go iteratively, problem by problem, try to build a solution and build something that's replicable. And if those are truly replicable, then we can maybe chip away at building change, the kind of change that we're talking about here.

Excellent. So everybody, you're all involved here in helping find the solution. Let Me skip over to Bojan. You gave us a glimpse of what this ocean cleanup is about, but I don't know if everybody understood what is it you're doing, how are you going to do it? How far along are you in deploying this technology? How does it work?

Sure. So just to go a bit over the basics, so the thing is that, as mentioned, the ocean is quite big. So to just go out there and clean it up, that would be pretty difficult. So what we propose to do is to use these very long floating barriers to kind of act like an artificial coastline there, where there is no coastline, where the plastic is accumulated so that we can first concentrate about 100,000 fold before we then physically extract it and then take it to land where we can then process it, recycle it, et cetera. So that was the idea that we had back in 2012, quite a while back, and then went through feasibility phase, started doing these scale model tests, the prototype, a few months ago in the North Sea. And now we're making the final preparations to be able to deploy the first operational system in the ocean in little over a year from now.

Where is it going to be deployed?

Well, there are a few areas that we look at, but, yeah, I think a few months from now we should be able to share where that is. There's still some.

And these barriers are still static and things flow through them and accumulate. Is that.

Yeah. So basically, instead of going after the plastic, we let the plastic come to us. So really using the natural ocean currents to do the hard work for us. So instead of it taking 79,000 years, we have been able to model that with a total of 60 miles of such systems. In 10 years, we can clean up about half or more if we deploy more systems or continue to optimize the design, which we're of course, certainly working on as well.

And you said very humbly, we. This was your idea, right?

Yeah.

And you're 22 now. You came up with this four years ago.

Yeah. So I was 16 and I was diving in Greece and I realized I came across more plastic bags than fish. So I thought, why aren't we cleaning this up? And back then I had to do a high school science project and then use that time to understand the problem and why everyone kept telling me that would be impossible to clean up. And then started studying aerospace engineering. I have a big passion for engineering problem solving. And then I just. After half a year, I thought, well, basically I'm just listening to these lectures and thinking, how can I apply this to this idea I have of cleaning the ocean. So then I thought, well, perhaps I should give this a go drop out and if it doesn't get off the ground true Silicon Valley style, then I could always re enroll. So I thought, well, it didn't feel like a risky thing but of course it did went viral. It did go viral on the Internet and that then allowed me to build the team and get the resources required to get to where we're now and hopefully to clean oceans as well.

One more question on this. How many of these stations or places where you're cleaning up? There's the Pacific, there's the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic. How many and what a sense of how long it will take to get, I don't know, half a third or two thirds of the garbage.

Sure. So there are five areas in the world where the plastic concentrates. They're the north and South Pacific, north and South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. But the reason we're starting with this one is because it's just the most polluted one. So yeah, actually we'll soon already be starting recruitment of engineers and operations people here in the Bay Area as well. I think it should already be live on our website. So now really ramping up to this operational phase. Although the pilot hasn't been deployed yet, we already need to make preparations here. So we're recruiting another, I think 20 or 30 people in the next three months just to be ready for that as well. And then in terms of numbers of systems, I think, yeah, so exact number depends on sort of the number of kilometers per system. So usually at the oceanic clip we calculate by span. So how many kilometers, how many miles do we need? And in total I think we get to about 100 miles per garbage patch, which should be enough to get about 50% in. Yeah, probably a bit less than 10 years.

Nishan, what sorts of solutions do you see the World Economic Forum bringing to the table the policy solutions or technology solutions. Give us some examples of things you hope you'll be able to pursue.

It's a very good question. I think we have to address oceans on multiple levels. I think at one level there are certain technological solutions that Buoyant and others are leading on and they will work in bespoke areas. But if we are to look at a 20 or 30 year horizon, we need system level changes. And at system level changes this means looking at the global governance systems. What are the different bodies that govern our oceans? And that means working with a multitude of countries, many of whom have different value systems. And how we use our ocean resources. And so that has particular challenges as well, both in terms of capabilities and value systems. I think the second is around the finance mechanisms. So what are the large scale flows of finance into oceans that can be used, that can use oceans in a sustainable way? And a third, very much mindful of where we are here in this bay area. How do we use that creative energy to foster an ecosystem of entrepreneurs who can develop new solutions, new technologies, new business models on how we can use oceans in a more sustainable way. So I think there's no one silver bullet, but there may be three or four levels where we look at the systems level changes, the technological solutions, the finance solutions. But what's clear is some of the tools that governments have. We're reaching the end of the usefulness of particular government tools, whether it's legal levers or tax levers. We do need much more innovative mechanisms. So we really need to push the frontier on what's possible.

Julie, what should we eat and not eat? You say we like salmon, we like shrimp. I've used your app, it's fantastic. I also read things in the news about how it's incredibly hard to trace where things can come from, that things are mislabeled, that even sort of, if you're buying at the sort of well intentioned store that has whatever stamp of approval is there, you're not 100% sure what you're getting. So what should we do as consumers to do the right thing?

It is very confusing. And before I answer that question, I want to to your question of are things connected? The cleanup project that you're working on is so awesome, but to the point of why we care about this plastic floating around in the ocean. I don't know if anyone mentioned the fact it's not just unsightly and I forget who published the paper, but it's projected that by 2050, the biomass of plastic in the ocean may exceed the biomass of seafood that we are harvesting. Meaning, you know, we're eating a lot of plant. There's a lot of plastic in our lives already and a lot of it we are. And we're going to be getting it through seafood. So. But another thing that we all can do here on the land side along with cleanup, you know, our mistakes from the past is stem the flow into the ocean. And of course a lot of people are working in that. I just want to do a shout out to the great groups working on the amazing initiatives to reduce plastic products in our lives. And right here in California, just coming up Very soon, if you're a voter here, you have the opportunity to uphold our statewide ban on single use plastic bags. And vote yes on 67 is what we all need to do, because we have a really awesome. We have a. California is a leader, you know, in environmental policy, not only in the US but in the world. I mean, what goes on here? People watch, and it's a really groundbreaking thing we've done here. But as usual, there's some pushback, so we got to keep it going on the seafood front. Yes, sadly, it has become quite confusing. When we started Seafood Watch, we thought, hey, you know, we just want to provide a handy little guide to people. Now we have something like 3,000 science reports on different fisheries around the world that we and our NGO partners are producing. And there are sort of two ways to go about looking at seafood and which to eat. Seafood Watch is a voluntary, like a watchdog program. So whatever the Seafood Watch app says, if it's. It says if it's a green rated product or fishery or farm seafood product, that means it's been assessed against our sustainability criteria and come out looking good. So you might ask, well, what is sustainability? And of course, many workshops and many hundreds of scientists have been involved with this and they will continue to be. But the main criteria are what's the status of the population? Is it being overfished? Is it, you know, holding its own despite the fishing pressure? Is there habitat damage? Because a lot of really bad fishing goes on that, you know, is destroying the sea floor and important habitats? Is there bycatch? There's a lot of wasted catch. And more recently, are there social justice issues with how the sea seafood is farmed or caught? We've all perhaps read recently about people under indentured servitude, working on ships at various places and even the processing. I mean, if you are buying some shrimp or crab from Indonesia, it could be that little kids picked the shrimp out of the shells.

So what are the worst things, Things we could be eating?

The worst things we could be eating?

Yeah. What would you tell anybody in this, in this audience? You go to a restaurant, don't order.

The worst things to eat? Well, the very worst things to eat. I mean, I think there are clearly some species that are severely overfished. Sharks. There are some legal shark fishing in the US Believe it or not. But generally speaking, more and more scientists agree that because sharks live long and they produce very late in life, and they're top predators and we're sucking them out of the ecosystem and it's Having a big impact. You want to lay off sharks. That's number one. Tuna. You know, a lot of the sushi that we see in our favorite restaurants, a lot of it's not such great news. Bluefin tuna, the magodo, the really fancy, really nice stuff. Those bluefin are amazing animals and. And sadly in the Pacific, they're severely depleted, like I said, 3% of their virgin biomass. There are other examples that I could list, certainly a lot of the farm shrimp. Most of the farm shrimp that we get here is imported and it can be brought into more sustainable practices. But right now, hundreds of miles of important mangrove, coastal mangrove, wetlands are being destroyed. And then when we have hurricanes, tsunamis.

In Asia.

In Asia and yeah, Indonesia and in the western Pacific nations also, we get a lot of farm shrimp from other places. Ecuador, for example. But it's a big deal in the western Pacific. And then farm salmon. Everyone's always perplexed about farm salmon. And these big intensive salmon aquaculture farms do have waste impacts. They use a lot of antibiotics. There are parasite issues.

Are there any good farm salmon?

Well, yes. The good news is that programs like Seafood Watch and these pushes through consumer awareness programs are improving the practices. And a big issue with aquaculture is what they call the feed conversion ratio. That to make one pound of salmon, which is a carnivorous fish, you know, you could use seven or eight pounds of wild fish to make the feed for the salmon. And the math just doesn't add up. The aquaculture business is really cleaning up its act. And they've got it to where now it's much more one to one. They're doing closed system containment. So you can find. There are a few salmon aqua corporations, operations that are getting to a better place. They're doing crazy things like making the omega 3, the special omega 3 fatty acids that salmon need through a GMO process, having geese make the product. So you're not even using wild fish. That's a whole nother debate.

All right. And a lot of this I can find in the app.

It's all on the app.

Doug, you mentioned one of your slides was about seabed mining. I would venture to guess most people don't know that that exists. What is it? Who does it, where? What are they looking for and what's the status?

And so that's the thing. We've actually become increasingly interested in seabed mining. Just sharing sort of in the same way that Julie did and her group, a lot of awareness building around sustainability in fisheries. Is there a role for us to do some Awareness building, using data for seabed mining. So seabed mining, deep sea mining sometimes called, is essentially mining the same way using some of the same tools. Often they're bigger. You saw an image of some of that's a 300 ton robotic, what's called bulk cutter that goes through and excavates these minerals from the bottom of the oceans. The troubling thing is that many of the ecosystems, these deep sea ecosystems that we're proposing to mine are essentially like redwood forests of the oceans. They're ecosystems that are full of very slow growing, often endemic, which means these are species that are found nowhere else on the planet. So there's some obvious red flags or at least some concern about how to do this well, and it is indeed starting so. So seabed mining used to be the thing of science fiction, right? It would be the thing you'd see in the abyss or whatever, but not something that was actually happening in our oceans. It is indeed underway right now, or at least we're in the prospecting phase now of looking for places that we want to mine minerals in the oceans. There are, as I mentioned, over a million square kilometers of seabed that have been gazetted have been put into these claim areas. There's a section just east of Hawaii that from one end to the other end of this claim claim field is as wide as the continental U.S. so one thing that we're doing right now to try to just like you said, who's mining it? Countries all over the world. So as Nishan mentioned, a lot of this mining is being proposed. Much of this area is in the high seas. That's in this global commons area where the minerals in theory belong to everybody on the planet, ui, people in Russia, people in Ecuador, as does the biodiversity. And we're the common stewards for looking after the future of that. So there are, there are mining claims from, from a diverse set of nations, from the uk, from Tonga, from, from Russia, China. Beyond what? What? One thing that, because of this very reaction that you've had is that people aren't aware of it. People want to know who's doing it, people want to know where it's doing. We're actually, we're launching today a transparency tool, a tracking tool for seabed mining that helps answers from those very questions and actually hopefully engages people in this process. It's called deep sea mining. Watch. You're all welcome to check this out. Essentially what it does is it answers that question digitally. It shows you exactly where the claims are, it shows you exactly who has what this vast area in the Pacific. It shows you exactly which countries are involved.

And are you using technology for to how do you detect where people are doing this?

So what we're trying to do is show actual gp. What we are doing is showing actual GPS tracks for vessels as they move across and prospect in the ocean. So it makes things so much more real for me. When you can look as you can now in deep sea mining, watch and watch a vessel from Tonga, for example, go back and forth over a claim area in the oceans at the size of Connecticut, suddenly you go, wow, this is happening, this is real. And to get that track, we basically need to sift through literally billions of data points. So we use a satellite derived signal that comes off a safety sensor on these boats, which originally was intended to make sure that cruise ship didn't crash into a mining vessel or any vessel in the oceans. We go through all that data, the same data that I showed you in that first slide that shows us where boats are. We run a series of behavioral algorithms that allow us to extract information on where prospecting and soon where mining will happen. And then we offered up data digitally. And the whole idea is, I think, something that's near and dear to all of your hearts. It's using a few simple analytics tools, it's serving up data with the philosophy that data is incredibly empowering, that if we get more minds, more eyes, more hearts, whatever on this process, it'll come out better for the oceans.

So we're getting close to the end of the session and I want to ask each one of you to tell the audience sort of what can they do? What's the sort of call to action? You know, there's learning about this. There's, you know, what do your projects need? You know, in terms of the cleanup, what are next steps? What can we do to move this forward? And leave here with a feeling like, okay, we've heard a little bit. I know there's a lot more to understand, unpack about the threats and the problems, but what can we do that's positive? And Nishan, do you want to start?

Sure. I think the first thing is continue to be interested in this topic. As Doug mentioned, the more eyes that we have on the topic, the more perspectives we have and where the solutions could lie. Julie's doing some tremendous work at the Montebellarium. So visit the aquarium, learn more about the oceans and then see where the skill sets that you all have can be applied. Whether it's some of the technology backgrounds, whether it's the advocacy, whether There are other ways to highlight what's going on on some of the beaches or coastal regions that you see, but I think that's a clear area. And also advocate to your local representatives as well that you want to see more action being taken on the oceans and that help build a movement to use our oceans in a much more sustainable way.

What do you need and what, what could the public do for your project?

Sure, yeah. I think I'd like to give two answers. One is specifically to my project and then one that's sort of in general, I think, which is also important, especially considering the engineering audience here. So with the ocean also, as mentioned, next year we want to have this first system in the ocean. But to make that happen, there's still this, a slight funding gap to bridge. We still looking for quite some funding there. So we're welcoming companies and individuals to partner with us to make that happen. I think it's the first time we're actually getting this stuff back to land. It will be big, 2km of system. It's plenty of space for logos, I think. So it is an opportunity, I think, in that front. So that's what we.

Are you looking for tech entrepreneurs to come up with ideas that can complement. Build on top of what you're trying to do?

Yeah, yeah. And certainly also, indeed we're recruiting. We're always looking for more engineers and then sort of, I think more in general, I think technology is really the most powerful agent that we have. I mean, the fact that we as one species can change the entire climate of, of a planet, I mean, that's quite astounding. And even though it's not even something that we do intentionally, it's sort of a side effect of our technology. We can actually, it's so powerful that we can change the climate of an entire planet. So that to me isn't an evidence that technology is good or bad. It really shows that technology is extremely powerful and that it should be managed well and should be used responsibly. And I think in a way there is this sort of arms race, just as you have the arms race in sort of oil extracting technology getting better versus solar technologies getting better. I think sort of the same thing is applicable to the ocean, where on one side you have sort of the restorative technologies getting better and lots of development there, as well as the extractive technologies. So it's kind of like an arms race. And just like when it comes to funding, you have now this whole social enterprise movement and impact investing movement where companies are Using their funding to do good things. I think Salesforce is a great example of this. I think the same thing should happen with engineers, because to do anything, you both need funding and you need people to create it. So as an engineer, you are in a very powerful position to use your time for something that's either making the world a bit worse or a bit better. So I think it's really responsibility, not only from the investors, but also from the engineers, to make things better. Again.

Julie, we should watch what we did.

Very good. Well, I think my first call to action, of course, would be around continuing to talk about the ocean and what's going on in it and. And help us continue to build the buzz about the whole sustainable seafood movement. The huge inroads that we've made in terms of these big sustainability commitments, in terms of turning around fisheries management to where many fisheries globally are on the road to recovery. Aquaculture is getting a lot better. It's getting its act together. That's because people got involved. So talk to people. You know, just ask. Just get the buzz going. That's what's created this whole global movement to happen. Also, I really believe in demonstrating success where you are. And I can't underscore enough the impact of what's happened here in California and especially Monterey Bay, which is probably one of the best studied, if not the best studied pieces of. Of the ocean on the planet now. And that happened because a lot of people, including the tech community here, over time, a lot of people rallied around and they came up with new ideas, and also they valued this place and that the place is recovered. I mean, there were species on the verge of extinction. That happened because people demonstrated success where they are. So all of that's what we're trying to do do at the aquarium. And we welcome and appreciate everyone's support to continue to take things to the next step. But great things are happening.

One of the things I associate with the aquarium and with Monterey is the sea otter. And I just read the sea otter population is the highest it's been in what, a century or something?

Yeah. It's about to be taken off the threatened species list. And now we need to figure out. Yeah. Which is. I mean, it's not really out of the woods. It's a whole other panel discussion to talk about why 3,500 sea otters is the right number to take it off the endemic species list. But never mind.

It's good news.

Celebrate progress. And those otters are recovering our ecosystem along the central California coast and making it Healthier. They're cleaning up the water in our wetlands. They're doing things. They're busy. Those otters are working. We had no idea. And the science is telling us what an important role that they have. They're not just a cute face.

Doug, quickly, as we are pretty much out of time, you've opened your door with this crowdsource initiative. What else do you want folks to do?

Well, I would follow up with a brief re endorsement of what Julie's doing. That every generation you have to reinspire and get the salt water of the oceans in your veins. Right. We don't think about mining, but often you don't think about bluefin tuna and how beautiful those are. So drag your kids down the coast from Monterey for a day and show them how beautiful and how special things are underwater. And then certainly this invitation that Mark and Lynn have allowed us to extend, we're bringing to the table a whole global community of marine scientists that want to help. And we're opening this invitation for ideas. We're opening this invitation. Invitation for partners. You know, I'm a bit of a fish out of water as a marine biologist at a tech conference, right. But it's been so exciting the past couple days thinking about partnerships. We've already engaged in a lot of exciting partners, partnerships with people here who have tools. We highlight a problem and you guys say, actually, I have a data tool or I can fix that by a design solution through an app. It's been just a wonderful few days. Send us more of those ideas. Come to us with the creativity that is endemic to this wonderful Salesforce family. And let's do something with this charge that Mark and Lynn have put on us with the Benioff Ocean Initiative. Let's do something together for the oceans.

On that note, please join me in thanking our panelists for an eye opening discussion and for the work they do every day. Thank you very.

Much.