(Science|Business) Europe must have stable, long-term funding for ocean intelligence, say researchers

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The EU is gradually building a coherent set of ocean policies, but the knowledge base required to support them is not yet secure, according to the bloc’s ocean researchers. A dedicated budget line in the next Horizon Europe would go a long way to filling this gap.

“There are four policy windows now being looked at for the European Competitiveness Fund and Pillar 2 of the proposal for the next Horizon Europe programme, but there’s no obvious home for ocean,” said Niall McDonough, director of policy, innovation and research services at the Marine Institute in Ireland. “We would worry as a community that it gets lost in there without a heading or a part of the programme where it’s specifically supported,” he told Science|Business.

One option would be for ocean research to become “a horizontal priority area, with a specific budget allocation” in the next Horizon Europe, he went on. There is a precedent for this in the cross-cutting Ocean of Tomorrow initiative that was part of the seventh Framework Programme for research and innovation, which ran between 2007 and 2013. Similarly, the European Commission has recently issued horizontal calls in biodiversity to satisfy cross-cutting policy goals.

For Nicolas Pade, executive director at the European Marine Biological Resource Centre (EMBRC), securing investment is all the more critical because ocean observation is a long-term endeavour. “The problems we have [. . .] require planning and sticking to a plan. Not tearing it up and starting all over every time we change the colour of our political party,” he said.

The discontinuation of the European Maritime, Fisheries and Aquaculture Fund is a case in point. Set up in 2021 to support innovative projects ensuring that aquatic and maritime resources are used sustainably, it is due to be rolled into the National and Regional Partnership Plans with other traditional cohesion policy funds from 2028. “The mechanisms we’ve relied upon up to now are kind of disappearing,” McDonough said.

A rising policy tide

These concerns are voiced at a time when EU policy on the oceans is gaining a much-needed structure. 

In 2025, the Commission proposed an Ocean Pact as a framework to unify EU ocean policies. It will be followed by the EU Ocean Act, a legislative proposal intended to serve as a single reference point for all economic, climate, environmental, and social targets to protect and sustainably use ocean resources.

When it comes to ocean intelligence, the OceanEye strand of the pact aims to have the EU reach 35% of global ocean observing capacity by 2035. To do this, it has €92 million from the current Horizon Europe programme. And more recently, the EU and Canada together launched an international alliance to strengthen the Global Ocean Observing System, securing nearly €220 million in pledges from over 30 countries. 

“It’s not until recently [. . .] that the EU has sought to support the full marine knowledge system by targeting improved coordination and development of Europe’s ocean observing capacity,” McDonough said. “There’s a growing appreciation of the value and importance of these systems.”

For Hajo Eicken, director of the Alfred Wegener Institute, the continent already has strong, well-spread monitoring resources. “What is missing is to connect these capabilities more effectively, and to develop a sustained and coordinated European ocean observing system.”

Data autonomy

Europe’s strategic need for its own ocean intelligence is underlined by recent disruptions caused by the Trump administration in the US. 

For example, the future of the Argo array of 4,000 robotic profiling floats is uncertain due to federal budget cuts and expiring grants in the US, by far its largest single funder. Global monitoring also came close to a data blackout when the Trump administration attempted earlier this year to dismantle its $386-million Ocean Observatories Initiative.

So long as this uncertainty continues, Pade sees ways for Europe to strengthen its autonomy. “We want to be working with like-minded organisations to shore up a multilateral system with fail safes to ensure that even if one player decides to change the rules, the rest of the house of cards doesn’t come crashing down.”

This does not mean isolating the continent, but making sure “that we are in control of the data that we generate, that we are not denied access to that data by anyone, and that we also step up and produce a lot more of that data and spread the load better.”

Tymon Zieliński, head of the Climate and Ocean Research and Education Unit at the Institute of Oceanology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, would like the EU to focus a lot more on coastal areas. “At the end of the day, it’s the coastal zone that is going to be the victim of strong storm surges, sea-level rise and pollution,” he told Science|Business. 

Meanwhile, McDonough thinks more effort is required to access the large volume of data collected by companies that is currently unavailable due to technical and administrative barriers. “We need better systems for what’s called data ingestion, and we need better cooperation and coordination with industry.”

Pade goes further, suggesting that academia and industry could work more closely together to generate mutually beneficial ocean observation data, spurring investment in observation systems. 

“The sooner the companies and academics sit down to work around the table, the more efficient that product development becomes,” he said. Observation sensors, for instance, are notoriously difficult to move from academic prototypes to profitable products.

Pade would like to see the EU help identify the “bridge-builders” where both parties can interact and share ideas.

The recently adopted charter of access for industrial users to research and technology infrastructures goes in the right direction, but the question of capacity has yet to be adequately addressed. “We just don’t have enough technicians today in EMBRC on the various platforms to enable that mechanism without giving priority to certain users over others,” he said.