Protecting our Planet Day (POP) 2023: Protecting Our Ocean

Live-stream schools event with sessions and class activities
A discarded plastic drinking cup floats at the surface of the sea.
An inspiring live-streamed event for schools led by the UK Space Education Office (ESERO-UK) at STEM Learning, in collaboration with the European Space Agency and the UK Space Agency.
With an audience of 54,000, POP brought together inspirational experts working to tackle climate change through interactive primary school sessions and career journeys.

Protecting Our Ocean

Dr Lauren Biermann , Lecturer in Marine Science (Remote Sensing) and Dr Dan Clewley, Senior Research Software Engineer at Plymouth Marine Laboratory explained how they use satellite data and machine learning to detect plastic floating in our oceans and coastal waters.
Lauren was the first person to detect patches of ocean plastics using satellites after she collected images via the ESA Sentinel-2 satellites of floating seaweed, and what we know now to be plastics. With Dan, they published their findings in 2020 ‘Finding Plastic Patches in Coastal Waters using Optical Satellite Data’ that became the third most downloaded earth science paper in Nature Scientific Reports. Since then, hundreds of scientists have used the Sentinel-2 satellites to find plastic floating in oceans all over the world.

Our contribution to the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP28)

Bringing together representatives from 198 parties across the world, to unite around tangible climate action and deliver realistic solutions, the aim to meet the Paris Agreement. This Agreement aims to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100 and to adapt to the existing effects of climate change.
Planet Earth as appearing from space with warm sunlight.