The UN Global Compact, the world's largest corporate sustainability initiative, will organise a high-level meeting on Harnessing Ocean Electricity at the 2020 UN Ocean Conference in Lisbon on 2-6 June. 

The meeting is based on the Five Tipping Points identified by the Global Compact's Action Platform for Oceans. The Platform joins together leading actors from business, academia and governments to determine how ocean industries can deliver a healthy ocean and a prosperous ocean economy.

The Action Platform has created Sustainable Ocean Principles that companies can endorse in order to demonstrate their commitment to ocean sustainability. Companies with a combined market value exceeding 2.5 trillion US dollars have already signed on. This initiative will enable the market forces to drive development in the right, more sustainable direction.

More information on endorsing the Principles can be found here.

The Interreg North-West Europe (NWE) Programme is organising its first impact event on 4 and 5 December 2019, taking place in Tourcoing, France. The Interreg NWE Programme supports five transnational ocean energy projects that aim at bringing new technologies to the market and stimulating strong policies for the sector.

In the opening session, Oliver Wragg from EMEC will discuss the opportunities to maximise the impacts of projects.

The event also features a dedicated workshop for ocean energy, where project partners will discuss their needs, find synergies and elaborate ideas for further cooperation.

More information and the agenda can be found here.

You can register here before 15 November.

ETIP Ocean will publish a new Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) early next year. The SRIA will detail the priority research, development and innovation challenges that most merit funding in the years ahead. The existing SRIA is a valued reference for the European Commission, and is also consulted by national and regional funding authorities.

To make sure that the SRIA best reflects the sector's needs, ETIP Ocean will organise two consultation webinars open to the whole ocean energy sector.

During the webinars, we will present the draft SRIA and open the floor for discussion. Based on the webinars' outcomes, we will produce the final document that will be published in January 2020.

The webinars will take place on:

• 27th November at 10 am UTC / 11 am CET - wave-focused
• 28th November at 2 pm UTC / 3 pm CET - tidal-focused

The first webinar will be more focused on wave energy and the second one on tidal energy. However, you can participate in either one regardless of your interest.

You can register to the webinars here: wave-focused & tidal-focused.