This event will look to mainstream conversations on the relationships between ocean health and human health through launching a new Ocean Panel Blue Paper ‘How can a healthy ocean improve human health and enhance wellbeing on a rapidly changing planet?’, and by gathering diverse voices to identify and discuss actions that both are being taken now, and that can be taken immediately, to the benefit of both ocean health and human health and wellbeing.

Screening of short film prepared by Ocean Panel Secretariat, featuring:

  • Lora Fleming (co-lead author) - American physician and epidemiologist and Chair of Oceans, Epidemiology and Health at the European Centre for Environment and Human Health of the University of Exeter Medical School (Cornwall, UK)
  • Radisti Praptiwi (contributing author) - Indonesian environmental scientist, lecturer at the Faculty of Health Sciences, and Head of the Sustainability Research Cluster at Esa Unggul University (Jakarta, Indonesia)

Keynote Speeches:

  • Vidar Helgesen, incoming Executive Secretary of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO
  • Peter Thomson, UN Special Envoy for the Ocean
  • Vanessa Kerry, Special Envoy for Climate Change and Health for the World Health Organization

Panel Discussion:

  • Jacqueline Uku, Senior Research Scientist, Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute (KMFRI), and Ocean Panel Lead Expert (Moderator)
  • Shakuntala Thilsted, Danish aquatic food and nutrition expert, and Director of the Nutrition, Health and Food Security Impact Area Platform at CGIAR
  • Lora Fleming, American physician and epidemiologist and Chair of Oceans, Epidemiology and Health at the European Centre for Environment and Human Health of the University of Exeter Medical School
  • Ella Whitman, ECOP and early career researcher at the Global Observatory on Planetary Health at Boston College