The 21st century’s ‘black gold’, rare earths are a group of 17 metals (scandium, yttrium and the 15 lanthanides) that share certain properties. Mined since the 1940s, they have become strategically important minerals...
Monaco. Passionate about the Sea
Blue Innovation. You are widely acknowledged as a leader on maritime and environmental matters, notably thanks to the foundation that you established in 2006. What do you think Monaco’s role in this field will be over...
Half a billion Australian dollars to save the Great Barrier Reef
With over 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands stretching over 2,600km and a surface area of nearly 348,000km2, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef off Queensland is the largest coral reef and the largest biogenic...
Social Innovation. Blue Growth through Cooperation and Solidarity
In 2002, the Lower North Shore of Quebec, Canada was struck with a fishery crisis resulting from the closure of the local crab and cod fishery. For the affected small isolated communities along the Gulf of St Lawrence...
Algae, an effective lever for carbon-free agriculture and consumption
The Olmix Group is a French SME based in Brittany with a turnover of 155 million euros (2017)—80% of which was exports. The Group works through a worldwide network of 27 locations and 800 partners in 100 countries. Blue...
Green & Blue-economy: Bioplastic trends
The excess of plastic waste floating over the Oceans has become a highlight topic on the media. Coincidentally, recent footage of a plastic waste wave in Haiti has opened TV news around the world. Over the last decade...
Mexico: building a blue sustainable and profitable business around sea cucumbers
Mexico is a large country that has an exclusive economic zone covering an area of 2,715,012 km2. This is more extensive than the continental surface of Mexico, the North Pacific region being the most important in...
BioMimetx: a promising company
BioMimetx is a Portuguese Biotech company, that is inspired by Nature to research, develop and commercialize natural and innovative compounds recovered from bacteria. After an initial seed funding for the Proof of...
The “Blue bio value” program
The equation simply doesn’t have a solution if we continue to do things as we do today. We won’t be able to supply a growing demand and reduce CO2 emissions to desirable levels without changing dramatically the way we...
Precision 3D imagery thanks to a new submersible laser camera
The European Project UTOFIA (‘Underwater Time Of Flight Image Acquisition’) has enabled researchers to design a new kind of underwater camera. Unlike current technologies that lack precision and are very time-consuming...
Naval Énergies ebbs away from marine current power
On the 26th of July 2018, Naval Énergies—a subsidiary of the French company Naval Group, Europe’s leading naval defence contractor and a major actor of renewable marine energies—announced that it would stop investing in...
The blue economy employs over 3.5 million people in Europe
The share of the blue economy in the European Union (all activities linked to the oceans, seas and coastal areas) is constantly increasing according to the EU’s first annual report on the matter, published in June 2018...
A campaign to preserve the ecosystem of the Southern (Antarctic) Ocean
In the 1980s, the oil and mining industries coveted Antarctica’s natural resources, but international efforts led to the signature of a historic treaty in 1991 that defined the continent as ‘a natural reserve, devoted...
A new ocean zone reveals the existence of new marine organisms
A team of scientists lead by oceanographer Alan Jamieson has discovered a new ocean zone that they propose to name ‘rariphotic’. According to a March 2018 article published in Nature Scientific Reports, this new, poorly...
Natural spies in the oceans?
In February 2018, DARPA (America’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) announced the creation of a new research project to investigate the possibility of using marine organisms for surveillance and the rapid...
The Government of Quebec will allocate 4 million dollars to its maritime industry
The Government of Quebec has decided to allocate 1.5 million dollars over a period of 5 years to the Centre de recherche sur les biotechnologies marines (‘marine biotechnologies research centre’, CRBM) in Rimouski...
A new version of the European Atlas of the Seas
The new version of the European Commission’s map of the oceans and seas has been given over 120 additional layers—from nature to tourism, security, energy, maritime transport, sea levels, consumption of fish and many...
‘Natick’—Microsoft’s submerged data centre
A Microsoft team has been working for several months on the second phase of Project Natick—an ‘undersea datacenter’ that was successfully deployed in early June 2018 off Orkney (United Kingdom). It will be remotely...