To address the ocean-climate crisis, the world needs to generate and scale innovative solutions quickly and effectively. The Global Ocean Negative Carbon Emissions (Global-ONCE) program successfully hosted a special event on April 6th, 2023, at the Ocean Visions Summit in Atlanta, USA. The conference gathered elite marine scientists and experts around the world. As an innovative, science-driven, ocean-based solution provider, the primary goal of Global-ONCE programme is to promote its approaches related to ocean carbon dioxide removal through active ocean carbon sink, as well as to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations with the ocean science community.
Global-ONCE co-chair Prof. Carol Robison delivered a brief opening remark, introducing ONCE prorgamme’ s objectives, the framework of ONCE organization, international committee members, and previous activities in the past two years.She expressed her sincere desire for the ONCE special event to be successful and productive.
The special event highlighted the presence of Prof. Nianzhi Jiao, who elaborated on the five missions of the Global-ONCE programme, including innovative research, research infrastructures, ONCE methodology exhibitions, global cooperation, and science popularization. Prof. Jiao emphasized the significance of promoting academic exchanges and encouraging project collaboration with global partners.
Global-ONCE members, Prof. Wei-Jun Cai, Prof. Meng Zhou, and Prof. Chuanlun Zhang demonstrated their project progress on the ocean alkalinity experiment, long-term all-weather research platform, and intelligent ocean microbe and CO2 monitoring system, respectively.
Global-ONCE collaborators Prof. Feng Chen shared his study on oxygenase distribution in the deep ocean, which plays a crucial role in the process of ocean carbon cycling. Prof. Michael Gonsior delivered a talk on the concept of the marine dissolved organic matter (DOM) reactivity continuum, offering a unique perspective on ocean carbon sinks.
The special event also included a discussion session, which invited experts from China, USA, UK, Germany, India to share their insights and empirical experiences on factors that should be taken into account to serve the Global-ONCE objectives and effectively achieve carbon neutrality.
Finally, Prof. Jiao representing the Global-ONCE programme, expressed sincere gratitude to the Ocean Visions Organization and all attendees for their support. The Ocean Visions & Global-ONCE special event marked a significant milestone in international collaboration between these two programmes and establishing ocean network with ocean science communities in North America.
Zeyu Zhang, Mengqi Pei, Chen Hu
Editing Contact: xjz@xmu.edu.cn