19 May 2011 | General, FA
European Maritime Day
Every year on 20 May, European Maritime Day is celebrated across the European Union to showcase the importance of the sea and oceans for our everyday life. European Maritime Day celebrates European maritime identity and sea-related activities.
A conference
This year, on 19 and 20 May, Gdańsk (Poland) will host the fourth annual European Maritime Day Conference to which around 1 000 participants are expected to attend.
Maritime Day has become the main European event where stakeholders from a range of maritime sectors meet and discuss the opportunities and challenges currently facing maritime regions and sectors across Europe: from tourism and fisheries to maritime transport and climate change.
European Commissioners Maria Damanaki, Siim Kallas and Janusz Lewandowski will join Polish and European ministers and personalities at the Conference on 19 May. The heading for this year's European Maritime Day is "Putting People First" – because the conference is centred on the many benefits that an integrated approach to Maritime Policy brings to European citizens and will include a specific focus on how it could bring more jobs.
A COST Action
COST is contributing to the theme of maritime research by supporting networks such as COST Action FA1004 'Conservation Physiology of Marine Fishes'. This COST Action coordinates marine fish conservation physiology research including over 50 institutions in Europe, to collate existing knowledge, reduce overlap, identify critical gaps in knowledge, and devise common approaches.
The COST Action is also coordinating interactions among physiologists, community ecologists and forecast modellers, to integrate physiology into models, improve their predictive power, and identify conservation priorities. All of this will ensure that the interactions among researchers and policy makers/stakeholders, to promote integration of research outcomes into strategies and policy decisions, for sustainable management of biodiversity and resources are well coordinated.
Integrated into the wider European research framework, COST does not work in isolation and was visited by the Marine Board's Executive Secretary, Dr Niamh Connolly, in late 2008, in order to discuss the organisation’s activities. He talked about major trends, opportunities and challenges for actors in European marine sciences today.
A Marine Board
The Marine Board is a European forum for marine science policy. Additionally, COST and the ESF Marine Board organised a conference to promote scientific excellence in marine biotechnology by providing leading scientists and young researchers with a platform to present their work, to discuss current scientific understanding and recent developments in key areas of marine biotechnology, and to identify the priorities for further research and infrastructure.
The conference "Marine Biotechnology, Future Challenges" looked at how marine biotechnology can contribute to these challenges is therefore an even more relevant question nowadays than ten years ago.
