Dear Mark, dear Ursula, the ocean is vital to our planet, our climate, our economies. We are one of the world’s leading maritime nations. We have the longest coastline of all EU countries. So protecting our seas is both a responsibility and a strategic priority, and we’re certainly acting on that responsibility.
We have just recently established two very big new Marine National Parks, one in the Ionian Sea, one in the southern Cyclades, in the iconic Aegean. We will protect 30% of our territorial waters well ahead of the 2030 target. But we know very well that effective protection requires knowledge, and we do need to understand our seas and our oceans much better and observe changes in real time and turn data into action.
We very much support this international alliance co-led by the European Union and Canada. We can make three very concrete pledges today. The first is we have already signed the convention establishing Mercator Ocean International as an intergovernmental organization, and we’re committed to very swift ratification by the Hellenic Parliament. We encourage other countries to do the same.
And the second we can do is to put our growing computing and AI capabilities at the service of this effort. We have significant new computing infrastructure – financed by the EU, dear Ursula – in our AI factories in Greece. We can provide additional computational capacity to process what is really a vast amount of ocean data and to contribute to the Digital Twin of the Ocean.
And third, we can strengthen our contribution to ocean observation and collection through our national space assets, in-situ observation systems, and our significant operational presence in the Eastern Mediterranean, which as we know is a hotspot for climate change. We can provide valuable data and enhance maritime domain awareness.
And in this regard, we also undertake the mapping of marine habitats within the Natura 2000 network and the two National Marine Parks in the Aegean and the Ionian. These are some practical commitments, but they reflect the core principles that we can only protect what we measure and what we truly understand.
So we’ll continue to work closely with the OceanEye Alliance, Mercator, the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), the European Commission, all our partners to deepen our knowledge of the oceans.
And thank you again, Ursula, on behalf of the European Union for taking this very important initiative. Thank you.
