MedCities Secretary General, Mr. Josep Canals, participated in the virtual workshop “OC-NET Ocean cities: challenges & solutions” aimed to answer to the question:’How we can manage and share methods and practices to support the ocean cities transition?’

The Ocean Cities (OC-NET) consortium coordinated a workshop within the “An Ocean of Values” in the framework of “The 5th Community Workshop of the IOC-UNESCO Ocean Best Practices System“. The OC-NET programme has received the 8th of June 2021 the endorsement of the United Nation’s Decade of Ocean Sciences for Sustainable Development 2021-2030 (the UN’s Oceans Decade). The initiative explores the potentiality of a linkage among research centres and cities to address the challenges cities face for the coming years.

 The workshop, celebrated on the 22nd September, was structured in three parallel sessions addressing respectively the topics of  Monitoring -Data Collection and Observations –; Culture Capacity building, Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and Ocean Literacy-; and Justice – Sustainability and Social & Environmental Justice-. MedCities Secretary-General, Mr. Josep Canals, intervened in this last one with the speech “Local authorities: from ideas to actions” stressing the need to engage local authorities in the development of policy agendas and displaying practical examples from MedCities projects and initiatives with engagement of member cities. He moreover highlighted the importance of exchanging and transferring knowledge and practice through adapted replication of successful processes.

OC-Net is one of the 28 Programmes endorsed in the first call for action of the UN Oceans Decade. During the upcoming 5 years the programme, led by the Marine Sciences Institut ICM-CSIC and bringing together the Barcelona City Council, MedCities, and C40 with 6 research centres, two  multidisciplinary networks and one art and theatre company, promote a transformative change on how coastal cities and their inhabitants perceive, interact and evolve with the ocean, from surrounding waters to the single global ocean.