June 8: World Oceans Day

World Oceans Day was launched in 1992, following the Rio summit. The opportunity to raise awareness among the general public about better management of the oceans and their resources.

Focus on the ocean on June 8, World Oceans Day. We talk about it with Laurent Chauveau, from GDR Omer, the CNRS seas and oceans scientific research group. We always talk about preserving the ocean, but today around the European continent we have several seas and oceans.

franceinfo: This preservation, Laurent Chauveau also involves high technology, must everything be taken into account with climate change?

Laurent Chauveau: Taking an interest in the ocean, being interested in its biodiversity, and identifying that this biodiversity is in bad shape and on a negative slope, that is done on a European scale. In any case, we will be forced to consider our impacts in the future as additional. It is not possible to imagine, for example, installing wind turbines to produce “carbon-free” energy and not simultaneously considering climate change, and/or fishing, and having intensive livestock farming in Brittany. , which change the chemical properties of the coastal strip.

The case of Denmark for example?

The case of Denmark. Finally, we have some current examples of research in Brittany, particularly on wind power, with noise, and fishermen, intelligently, asked the question: but what is the impact of wind noise? installation of a wind turbine on a scallop shell, that is to say, what gives me a living, me, a fisherman, what is this impact? Obviously, studying this impact of noise cannot be disconnected from the impact of simultaneous climate change. And recent figures say that we are capable of doubling the noise level at sea, globally, I am talking about the global ocean. We do it roughly every 11 years.

Studies clearly show that the more time passes, the more humans will live very, very, close to the coast. In the future, more and more Europeans will choose to live near coastlines. And that too is a big question for you as researchers?

It is a question both for geographers, and a question for water availability, a question for energy distribution and a question about how do we invite or force this population not to dump it into the sea, nitrogen, phosphorus, some lye and some chemicals.

You, the GDR, belong to the CNRS, we can say that the CNRS, today, is unique in Europe, it is you who has the greatest number of publications?

It is an effective research organization. As part of the GDR Omer, it is a structure which obviously welcomes researchers from the CNRS, which invites them to work in a working group. But it is a structure that invites the IRD and French universities or INRA to work jointly. It is a cooperative place for fundamental research.

The IRD is the Development Research Institute, and at the European level, so you work with your European colleagues on the issue of the ocean?

Fundamental research is a profession which is a daily invitation to international collaboration, whether with Europe or with the rest of the world, researchers try and seek to collaborate for practical reasons. So in Europe, let’s return for example to the poles: working at the North Pole necessarily means collaboration with Denmark, with Norway, with Germany and Iceland.

But, because the challenge is important when we speak, today, June 8, of World Oceans Day, France with its maritime territory of 11 million square kilometers thanks to the Overseas Territories, and Europe, That’s still a lot of seas and oceans?

It’s mostly about contrasts. We have a panel of ecosystems that is absolutely incredible, and we have to meet the requirements of monitoring the description, purely out of respect for our children.

These atmospheric variations impose climatic constraints on us or alternations or variations in climatic conditions, this is also true underwater, in very, very, impressive hydro-climatic conditions. I don’t know if our fellow citizens and our contemporaries still assess the extent to which we will have to change our lifestyles and adapt.