Today Ipieca joins the United Nations in celebrating the role of our oceans in Earth's biosphere and the critical resources it provides for livelihoods and communities around the world. The theme for 2020 is 'Innovation for a Sustainable Ocean', recognizing the need for proactive leadership and specialized solutions for the sustainable management of the world's oceans.
Ipieca's Vision is for an oil and gas industry that successfully improves its operations and products to meet society's expectations for environmental and social performance. To this end, Ipieca provides a platform to develop, share and promote sound practices and solutions, contributing to the protection of the marine environment through workstreams on oil spill preparedness and response, and biodiversity and ecosystem services (BES).
For over 30 years, Ipieca has been harnessing collective expertise and technology towards oil spill prevention, response capability building, and marine ecology impact management. Ipieca's new workstream Planning for response in a pandemic aims to ensure that efforts to prevent and mitigate oil spills are adaptable and reliable in the current context of COVID-19.
Since 1996, Ipieca and the International Maritime Organization (IMO) have jointly led the Global Initiative, an umbrella programme under which governments and oil and shipping industries collaborate to enhance national oil spill preparedness and response capacity. Innovation is at the forefront of this programme, with its emphasis on public-private partnerships ensuring cooperation in the event of an oil spill, maximising the use of existing expertise and resources.
Ipieca's work on operating in marine environments aims to broaden understanding and knowledge of BES good practice related to deepwater environments, where limited data availability and scientific knowledge can make it more challenging to effectively apply existing BES management processes into practice.
