At our inaugural Global Plastics Summit held on Oct 11-12th in Bangkok, Naka Kondo, the lead editor of Back to Blue Initiative spoke to Winnie Lau, project director, preventing ocean plastics at The Pew Charitable Trusts and Margaret Spring, chief conservation and science officer and Monterey Bay Aquarium. They discussed their impressions of the summit, and shared their recommendations and aspirations for the role of science and evidence in the treaty moving forward.

Follow the Back to Blue series for more podcast episodes, or visit backtoblueinitiative.com for more content.

Back to Blue is an initiative of Economist Impact and The Nippon Foundation.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Back to Blue’s lead editor, Naka Kondo speaks to Ben Alva, the founder of Azul Bio, a startup developing microbiome-based treatments and probiotics from nature that give ocean life

immunity to human impact, such as coral resilience. They are planning their first pilot in November.

Follow the Back to Blue series for more podcast episodes, or visit backtoblueinitiative.com for more content.

Back to Blue is an initiative of Economist Impact and The Nippon Foundation.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Charles Darwin once dismissed the ocean as a ‘tedious waste, a desert of water.’ Some of his contemporaries disagreed. The brave Challenger expedition of the 1870s set out to discover what lurked beneath, traversing over 100,000 kilometres and discovered 4,772 specimens, from sea snails to snake eels, discovered the deepest trench on earth, and toppled false assumptions about the lack of life under the waves. Over a century later, the Census of Marine Life picked up the baton. An eighty-country collaboration, with 2,700 scientists, the project identified another 6,000 species. Yet even these numbers are a literal drop in the ocean.

Oliver Steeds, Ocean Census director and chief executive of Nekton, a UK-based marine science and conservation institute, speaks to Naka Kondo, the lead editor of Back to Blue initiative about a new mission, the Ocean Census, launches this year with a far greater ambition: to find at least 100,000 new marine species in its first decade.

Follow the Back to Blue series for more podcast episodes, or visit backtoblueinitiative.com for more content.

Back to Blue is an initiative of Economist Impact and The Nippon Foundation.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.