“The Ocean is a common good and it is the issue from which we must start”, President Macron told us at the end of 2019. A few months later, a Ministry of the Sea was set up in the French government. Ms Annick Girardin, former Member of Parliament for Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon and Minister for Overseas Territories, now heads and embodies this ministry. On Friday 26 March 2021, she honoured the oceanography actors in the Toulouse/Occitania region. After visiting Météo France and SHOM (two shareholders of Mercator Ocean International), she came to visit Mercator Ocean International.
The Minister was accompanied by Mr Etienne Guyot, Prefect of the Occitanie Region, Mrs Mörch, MP for Haute-Garonne, Mr Nogal, MP for Haute-Garonne, Mr Monthubert, Regional Councillor for Occitanie, President of Occitanie Data and OPenIG and Mr Boureau, Departmental Councillor. Pierre Bahurel presented Mercator Ocean International’s teams, professions and collaborative and partnership-based working methods and explained, in particular through interactive digital applications, how our activities serve the general interest in favour of sustainable oceans: “Born 25 years ago from the French vision of building an operational oceanography service under the impetus of six public establishments (CNES, CNRS, IFREMER, IRD, Météo France and SHOM), Mercator Ocean International has become, over the course of the years, the European leader in ocean analysis and forecasting. Its governance is now multi-national, with associated organisations in France, Spain, Italy, Norway, the UK and soon in other EU Member States. “Our first asset is our operational capacity to describe a digital ocean across the globe, allowing access to information on the environment, consistent with the major ocean observation systems and transformed to be accessible to experts and non-experts alike, following the example of the European Union’s Copernicus Marine Service that we have been piloting since 2014.”
Interactive digital application “MyOcean” developed for museums and science cities.
Mercator Ocean International is committed to building a sustainable and relevant base of scientific and technical knowledge to address major global issues (climate, environment, biodiversity, ocean governance, sustainable economy, etc.). “We have reached a certain maturity in the field of Digital Oceanography, which allows us not only to describe the physical and biogeochemical state of the ocean in a realistic and operational way, but also to determine the upstream needs in terms of earth observation and to know how to develop its uses. This is why, in addition to its shareholders and the European Union’s Copernicus programme (30,000 subscribers and 250,000 users worldwide), we now serve European diplomacy (EU4OceanObs) by hosting and serving the European activities of GEO and the G7 Coordination Center /GOOS (Global Ocean Observation System), we deliver an annual Ocean State Report for the European Union based on the state-of-the-art ocean monitoring indicators, we are involved in the IPCC productions (Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere), and we are involved with the IOC-UNESCO in the Decade of Ocean Sciences, which is due to be launched on 31 May.
In a few months’ time, Mercator Ocean International will be moving to the heart of one of Toulouse Metropole’s major urban projects, Toulouse Aerospace, an eco-neighbourhood dedicated to innovation and the European influence of the Metropole. “It is a new blue dynamic that Mercator Ocean International wishes to instil in the world from Toulouse, the cradle of a solid oceanographic sector in the heart of the EU”, Pierre Bahurel explained to the Minister and her delegation, and our point seems to have been clearly understood.