Data is fundamental — it’s a necessity for understanding our changing planet; evaluating and improving the effectiveness of promising solutions; policies, markets, and nature-based solutions and interventions must be based on clear understandings so they can be scaled with trust and confidence. While data is used across all sectors of society — 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created each day and the pace accelerating with IoT and remote sensing — our focus is on the oceans.

This narrows our inquiry and perhaps simplifies things a little. While the internet was founded upon principles of freedom, open access, and self governance, how have we gone astray, who owns the world’s data? Who wants it to be free and what good will that do? How is it governed, collected, analyzed, and processed? What is the lifecycle? How are applications changing with the rise of new technologies such as AI, IoT, the metaverse, and web3?