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Tuesday, 15 March 2011

The UWA Oceans Institute is poised to play a role in helping provide solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems, including how to feed the nine billion people estimated to be on the planet by 2050.

That was one of the points raised at an industry forum organised by the Institute in early March.
The forum gave the newly-appointed Director of UWA Oceans Institute, Professor Carlos Duarte, an opportunity to outline his vision for the Oceans Institute.

“The motto of UWA Oceans Institute is that we want to provide oceans solutions for humanity’s grand challenges,” Professor Duarte said.

“The main goal of this industry forum today is to see how we can best align this vision with the needs of industry and the needs of the society of Western Australia and even beyond in the Indian Ocean.”

Professor Duarte said some of the grand challenges facing humanity include:
• Food and water security
• Clean energy
• Healthy ecosystems delivering services and goods
• Developing systems of ocean governance and space planning, and
• Capacity building.

To emphasise the enormity of such challenges, he quoted a recent report by The Economist magazine which posed the ‘nine billion people question’: how to feed the world’s population which was estimated to grow to more than nine billion people by 2050. He pointed out that the magazine, like many people, did not realise the role our oceans could play in providing solutions.

“This is the only planet that is largely covered by an ocean, and we live our lives with our backs to the ocean. We do not ‘see’ the ocean even though it is really in front of us,” Prof. Duarte said.

“We have huge resources on land, but the oceans have the potential to deliver resources to supply the needs of these estimated nine billion people – if we are intelligent in the ways we can use the oceans to deliver these resources and we do not commit the same mistakes that we’ve made in extracting resources from land, and that have brought us largely to the situation we have today in facing famine in different parts of the world, water insecurity and insecurity in food supply.”

Professor Duarte said his vision for the Oceans Institute involved using its expertise to work with industry and other stakeholders to come up with innovative and sustainable solutions.

“What we need to do is move from excellence in ocean science and technology, which is something UWA already has, to take this extra step from international excellence to delivering solutions,” he said.

“We cannot really do that by working in isolation on marine technology, or marine sciences, or the laws of the sea. We have to integrate and connect all of these. And this is what the Oceans Institute is designed to do.”

He said potential solutions to be worked on could include:
• Marine energy sources (such as wind, thermal and wave power) and ‘blue’ bio-diesel
• Aquaculture and marine food production
• Marine-based solutions to climate change and mitigation
• The use of marine resources to offset the climate impacts of carbon dioxide
• More sustainable desalination technologies

• Marine genetic bio-resources for food, bio-medical and energy purposes.
The forum also heard from two Oceans Institute scientists who gave briefings on some of the work undertaken by the Institute.

Professor Anya Waite spoke about ocean currents and surface temperatures in the North-West of WA and related it to work involving the life cycle of the western rock lobster and implications for aquaculture.

And Winthrop Professor Mark Cassidy, the Director of Centre for Offshore Foundation Systems, outlined the Centre’s role in modelling underwater structures for engineers that could withstand pressures of some 300 gravities.
Colin Beckett, Chevron’s General Manager of the Greater Gorgon Area, gave an industry response in which he outlined environmental safeguards undertaken as part of dredging operations at Barrow Island for the Gorgon LNG project.

Media references

Tony Malkovic (on behalf of UWA Oceans Institute)  (+61 4) 11 103 398
Janine MacDonald (UWA Public Affairs)  (+61 8)  6488 5563  /  (+61 4) 32 637 716

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