Aquarium to be global leader in ocean protection
Institute aims to be a global leader in education and conservation efforts
Establishing a global ocean conservation institute in Vancouver and calling for global action to restore and preserve them is a bold and ambitious plan that launched Thursday on — what else? — World Oceans Day.
Called Ocean Wise, its aim is to inspire citizens globally to create and sustain healthy oceans. The hope is the institute’s website will become the pre-eminent source for oceans research and information on related topics both big and small.
Folded into the Ocean Wise institute is the Vancouver Aquarium along with its research facilities, marine rescue centre and educational programs. And, if the name sounds familiar, it’s because it was initially the name as the aquarium’s sustainable seafood program, used as a tool to encourage restaurants, chefs and home cooks to tackle overfishing through education and awareness of species that aren’t endangered.
Building a conservation institute here makes sense. Vancouver aspires to be the world’s greenest city. It was the birthplace of both Greenpeace and the Sea Shepherd Society. And, in 1964 when Moby Doll was harpooned and brought to the aquarium, worldwide interest was sparked and attitudes about killer whales and other cetaceans was irreversibly changed.
It could be challenging for Ocean Wise to attract the world’s best ocean researchers as well as the donors to support them.
What’s not in doubt is the pressing need for more information about the health of our oceans.
As the climate is changing, the effects on oceans that cover three-quarters of Earth’s surface is dramatic, from the rapid decline in Arctic and Antarctic sea ice and increasing salinity, to rising sea levels that by 2050 will threaten as many as 25 million people in coastal communities, island nations and low-lying countries such as Bangladesh.
The problems don’t begin or end with climate change. Overfishing remains a concern. And plastics pollution is not only the focus of World Oceans Day this year, it also happens to be a key study topic for Ocean Wise’s pollution research program.
Every year, between five billion and 12 billion tonnes of plastic are dumped into oceans. There’s the big stuff that swirls in Texassized islands in the five gyres, where ocean currents meet. More concerning and more difficult to dispose of is the smog of plastic microfibres and microplastics. Invisible to the eye, they absorb and release toxins as they break down. Increasingly, they’re found in guts of the smallest crustaceans. Those copepods in turn are eaten by larger animals and the microfibres and plastics make their way up the food chain — even to us.
The aquarium’s evolution and rebranding as an institute charged with raising global awareness of ailing oceans isn’t a sudden one as some critics might suggest.
It was conceived in 2013 when the aquarium’s $100-million expansion for its Arctic exhibit was still on track. The launch date was set months before two belugas died mysteriously in November 2016 and before the Vancouver park board’s decision last month to ban cetaceans at the aquarium.
Ocean Wise will remain a nonprofit organization and John Nightingale will continue as the CEO of the new organization.
It will also continue and enhance the aquarium’s research, education and efforts to engage diverse organizations and individuals. More controversially, the plan is to not only continue the management of aquariums in Vancouver and Valencia, Spain, but potentially add more.
“We used to be an aquarium with a really rich mixture of research, education and conservation programs,” Nightingale said Thursday. “We’ve switched that 180 degrees to a conservation organization.”
Ocean Wise’s goal is to become the pre-eminent source of information about oceans, whether it’s to find videos about scientists engaged in conservation efforts or to get the latest research on sea star wasting syndrome, the rising mortality of orcas, the effects of rising water temperatures in the Arctic Ocean, or a recipe for a sugar scrub to replace commercial cleansers that often contain plastic microbeads or an all-purpose cleaner.
Educational programs will continue to be delivered physically at the aquarium’s site, but the hope is 100 million people will learn from or be inspired by the website by 2020 and a billion people by 2025. It sounds incredible until Nightingale points out that every year a million people visit the aquarium in Stanley Park and, last year, the aquarium’s website had 16 million visitors.
The website’s target audience is millennials, so it’s all about stories, videos, lists and individual challenges with some long articles for those who want to delve more deeply.
“The only thing that we can do to ensure a positive future for the oceans and other parts of Earth’s environment as well is if we humans need to make some changes and we can do that one at a time without wrecking the economy or turning our families upside down,” Nightingale said.
“But we have to start.”
We used to be an aquarium with ... research, education and conservation programs. We’ve switched that 180 degrees to a conservation organization.