You’ve heard about the context of the panel, so let’s dive right into part I…
Meet the Hosts
Natalie Harms, UNEP
Natalie is Marine Litter Focal Point at UNEP’s COBSEA Secretariat: the Coordinating Body on the Seas of East Asia (COBSEA) is a Regional Seas programme and intergovernmental body for the protection of the East Asian Seas. Natalie is passionate about reducing marine debris and is particularly concerned about the surge in the volume of plastic waste (such as masks and gloves) that has been seen as a result of the pandemic.
Chloe Harvey, The Reef-World Foundation
A passionate scuba diver and marine biologist. As a Director at The Reef-World Foundation, Chloe is leading the charity’s global Green Fins initiative. Through Green Fins, the charity is driving sustainable practices across the diving and snorkelling industry.
Meet the Panel
Katie Thompson, PADI
Katie has worked at PADI for the past 7 years as the Global Brand Director and this summer became the Global Director of CSR in order to focus full time on implementing PADI’s conservation mission. Katie works in tandem with Project AWARE on the long-term strategic vision for ‘fins on’ and ‘fins off’ diver activism and is passionate about creating a healthier dive and dive tourism industry for both people and planet.
Jacob Dalhoff, Paralenz
Jacob was an active diving instructor for 10 years across various destinations, such as Egypt and Maldives, which embedded his love for the ocean and the wish to protect and restore it. Today he is an active part of a global community speaking up for the ocean and the need for its protection. As the Partnership Manager of Paralenz, he works to create ocean positive relations with the conservation society, in order for Paralenz and TheOceanBase to have the strongest impact possible and help reverse the steep decline of life beneath the surface.
Jason Haiselden, Scuba.Digital
Jason is a PADI DiveMaster who has been diving since 1996 and runs ScubaClick - the liveaboard management system - along with his colleagues Stefan, Boris and Lesley. The idea of hosting an online dive show came about at DEMA last year and, having bought the software and forgotten about it, the Covid-19 pandemic prompted the project being brought into fruition. And now here we are at Scuba.Digital – the #1 online dive show.
PADI trains millions of divers around the globe and is a trusted authority in diver education. PADI’s new tagline is “Seek Adventure. Save the Ocean”. Tell us how you are making this old mission a reality and how can you use your voice to teach sustainability and drive positive environmental change?
Katie, PADI: For over 54 years, our tagline has been “the way the world wants to dive”. We shifted late last year to “Seek Adventure. Save the Ocean” because we wanted to deepen our commitment to conservation. It’s always been part of our educational narrative and is embedded in everything we do, However, we felt we had a real responsibility to take deeper care of our oceans by mobilising as many people around the world to take action. There's a multitude of ways we're going to be doing that.
We've created a movement called the Torchbearer initiative. Our mission actually is to sign up a billion Torchbearers to save the ocean. We know that's a lucky number but we really want everyone to join us in this effort. We want to empower everyone to take fins on fins off action. We’re moving beyond just underwater efforts and focusing on what anybody can do above and below the surface to take action. We're providing a framework to do that as well as expanding our partnership with Project AWARE to focus on conservation efforts so we're all working towards a common, unified goal.
Paralenz has sustainability built into its core. You equip your customers with the ability to make a positive impact for our ocean. How do you appeal to divers to choose sustainable products and what can other businesses learn to catalyse positive consumer demand?
Jacob, Paralenz: I think the key is purpose of purpose. In our case, it's very much from the core of our hearts. It can be beneficial for everyone to put purpose and a tangible call to action at the top funnel. This creates more awareness and is really beneficial both short term and long term especially in today's trends.
Of course, as a company we feel an obligation in our position: as a tool for visual storytelling and as a camera. We look at it as two verticals. One being the ability to help our user create more content and more video. This is the best inspirational tool to share the beauty of the ocean. The more video there is, the more ocean ambassadors we will create.
The other vertical is connecting the recreational water sports community with the science community. That's why we incorporated temperature sensors, a conductivity sensor and GPS into the camera. We are also working to read the videos that are willingly uploaded by our users to the Ocean Base to be able to gain knowledge about things like coral condition and fish abundance. This can make the millions of dives that take place every day an extended arm of conservation efforts and restoration management,
This digital dive show format is a new experience for all of us. Do you see potential for digital dive shows to help reduce the environmental impact associated with flying around the globe to dive shows?
Jason, Scuba.Digital: Yes, we can definitely help reduce the impact. We've seen over the last six or seven months of Covid, lots of pre-existing physical dive shows wanting to do something in place of that because they can't do it. Some have done it through some webinar and video work. We think we're first doing it in this particular format where people are actually live at the online event. It does bring a new dimension to dive shows that hasn't been around. It will probably be slow to take off but COVID is preventing dive show organisers from attracting exhibitors because the exhibitors themselves can't go to a dive show at the moment. Because of that, they’re looking to live events like this one. While you can’t touch or smell a product in this digital environment, you can see and learn about things without having to travel.
I think dive shows of the future will be like this because more and more exhibitors will choose not to fly to 50 different dive shows around the world; largely because of the cost. The one fundamental thing that will drive change is saving money. Particularly in the current environment, saving money is really important right now. This is the opportunity to change. How far we can drive that change, we have yet to find out.
Divers love gear but how do I know whether an item is sustainable and what type of questions should I ask?
Jacob, Paralenz: It depends on what type of equipment it is. However, it’s important to look at: what kind of packaging are they using; where and how is it manufactured; what is the company's brand mission; do they want to make an impact; and what is their stance on the negative impact that they surely have in manufacturing. I think it's very important for manufacturers to not be discouraged and to make and communicate the impact because you have a negative impact somewhere along the value chain. It's extremely important to be transparent about this wish to want to find better solutions. As a consumer, get to know the brands to find out about their manufacturing processes, their shipping, packaging and do they have an inherent purpose that their products help the greater good.
Aside from Paralenz, I’d love to give a shout out to Fourth Element for their incredible branding and innovation. I know the founders personally and it's not a shallow CSR profile. This is very much embedded into the management and they make incredible products while doing good.
What are the best environmental courses I can take to learn more about ways to protect the reef through my diving?
Katie, PADI: We have a plethora of offerings through our partnership with Project AWARE. They have staffers on board that write the curriculum and the AWARE courses that we have. They have experts working on conservation policy to make sure those courses really are benefiting people and planet. There are courses you can take fins on and fins off. For example, the Project AWARE specialty can be taken in tandem with your Open Water course or just on its own. That really shows how you can take action for the ocean: some of the things you can do above and below the surface to take care of our reefs while diving. You can also get more specialised through different courses we offer such as AWARE shark conservation or coral conservation and more courses coming soon too as we expand the programme.
Our most flagship programme – Dive Against Debris – is probably the most popular conservation course we have. It’s very powerful that divers can collect trash while diving and then upload data to the Dive Against Debris app. That information is collected and used to help formulate policies. Of any course, I would definitely recommend certified divers take that one right now because it is helping drive change at the local level as far as marine debris is concerned.
Can you tell us a bit more about the Ocean Base and how this footage that is connected with Paralenz’s cameras can really contribute to marine conservation? What message do you have for underwater photographers in general?
Jacob, Paralenz: We have the obligation as the camera manufacturer to convey the message of diving with awareness when you are using a camera. In collaboration with Reef-World who has been very supportive of this.
We’ve all seen the divers with cameras lying all over the reefs and not paying attention to anything other than what's going on in the viewfinder. We can only urge our customers, and divers in general, that they really take care of the surroundings first and the pictures second.
We know that the camera is something a lot of people want to bring on their dives to share their holidays. When developing this camera we realised that by adding temperature conductivities, GPS and a depth sensor, we were able to have this data collection for marine research. So, restoration efforts piggyback on people sharing their holiday moments. That data is not really relevant if it's not put to use. So, to add more value we have focused on working with conservation organisations, universities, and governmental organisations, such as NOAA, to learn what is important for the science restoration and conservation community. We then do our utmost to streamline the whole journey of that data.
So, when you come up from a dive with a Paralenz camera, you connect it to the app then you have already provided us with temperature depth and, with the new camera coming out, location and conductivity. If you then take the step further, you can share your video on the platform inside the app, which is called The Ocean Base. It’s essentially a world map. If you upload which parts of the video you want to share to the world map, it will be pinned for other divers to see and be inspired to travel to these different destinations. You're also giving us the opportunity to use this video. At the moment, we are focused on developing an AI that can read the videos and pull out the information about the conditions of the corals in the footage and correlate that with depth, temperature and location. The video that's being collected now will serve as a basis for teaching that algorithm and so is the basis for that future application.
How can PADI’s Torchbearer campaign engage divers as well as non divers?
Katie, PADI: Obviously, there's a torch bearer in the PADI logo and that's really where this comes from. It’s the idea of the diver holding the torch as a leader in conservation and protecting the ocean. We, as a brand, are trying to activate a billion people to take action for the ocean and become ocean advocates. Obviously all of those billions of people will not always be scuba divers. We want to provide a clear pathway for divers and non divers to take actions to the ocean and we call that fins on and fins off actions. We’re starting with our own audience because the best advocate for the ocean, and for the sport of diving, is a diver.
We are working on embedding this message - seek adventure, save the ocean - the ability for people to sign up as a torchbearer and to take action and being clear about what those actions are. We’re working with our partner Project AWARE on some really cool ways for us to engage in citizen science and to dive with a purpose every time. We’ve created a framework for that called the Torchbearer Five that's going to help inform and provide structure to what these actions are.
The other way we want to build torchbearers is to reach beyond the dive industry. A critical component of being able to grow this movement is to bring everyone that we can into it. So, we want to formulate strategic partnerships that will allow us to do that. We want to be able to speak to sailors, surfers, anyone that's a water enthusiast to hear this message. If a billion people are taking the same small action, it will add up to a much broader change.
Why has the intuitive focus on respecting the ocean been lost among PADI instructors in more recent years?
Katie, PADI: This is always a tricky question to answer because I do feel there is a level of subjectivity here. If you really dove into our training materials, the narrative of protecting the ocean has been embedded since the very beginning and it continues to evolve. We recently updated all of our training materials to include the use of reef safe sunscreen. We tell our instructors in their instructor training courses to teach the AWARE specialty to embody and embrace everything to do with ocean conservation and to passionately teach that to their students.
I'm not exactly sure where it's getting lost but we’ve taken note of this. I wonder where people are seeing a disconnect because we do teach that to our instructors and it’s embedded in all of our courses. If you were to flip through the Open Water diver manual, there's tonnes of sidebars on ocean conservation and diving respectfully. I think it does come down to the passion of the instructor and they have to personally make it their own mission to embody these messages and techniques. It is part of our standards and we have recently changed them. For example, when teaching skills such as regulator recovery, we’ve changed from kneeling to fin tips only on the ground to reduce our footprint on the ocean floor.
These messages are definitely embedded in the techniques and standards we teach our instructors. I think we could always do a better job. We can always make sure that we are reminding our instructors that they have a responsibility as much as all of us as divers. When they take on the role of being an instructor, they take on the role of this protector of the ocean realm. And further, making sure they're instilling this ocean advocacy with their student divers.
How big an impact can citizen science actually have?
Jacob, Paralenz: The short answer is massive. Inspiring other people to become ocean ambassadors is essentially a huge impact. I like to take the top down approach on divers as citizen scientists. The bottom up is divers being aware when they're going diving on holidays etc. The top down approach for this would be when looking at the UN declaring the Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development and the 30:30 strategy to protect 30% of our oceans by 2030.
We also envisioned that divers as citizen scientists and data miners, data collectors and observers will be able to document where are marine protected areas needed in coastal ecosystems. So, where is the damage the worst? Where are bleaching events happening? Where are Crown-of-Thorns epidemics happening? Documenting the need for marine protected areas is one thing. Then, once those areas are created we need to document the effects of these marine protected areas and see how the ecosystems are bouncing back as it's seen in many, many places. We can use that as confirmation that we need to create more marine protected areas. It affects everything: it’s not only that divers get more pretty reef to look at. It’s also fish stocks bouncing back and numbers of whales and mammals bouncing back. It affects entire coastal communities. The science community really needs data. It’s not just going out, serving an area, coming back with that data and then trying to correlate that to the last time they were out in that place maybe five years ago. We need to build up that foundation of knowledge in real time and as widespread as possible. That citizen science data mining, as I would call it - helping to collect data - has huge importance.
Key takeouts from part I
All of us can make conscious choices and look at the products we're buying and the mission statement behind them
Become a Torchbearer and take extra courses to learn more about conservation
Choose digital options and engage in platforms like Scuba.Digital
All of us can be citizen scientists to contribute to the knowledge we have about the ocean and to protecting it so we can keep diving and exploring for decades to come
Collaborate: tell your family, tell your friends, tell other divers. Work with scientist, the UN and other partners to join together on the journey
We're not going back to how it was before so this is an opportunity to change the way we're doing things and move ahead in a greener way of diving.
