Conference Greeting Remark

Hello, 안녕하세요，你好, Halo，হ্যালো, नमस्ते।, สวัสดี, Xin chào,こんにちは

I grateful thank you for visiting the AMEA ( Asia Marine Educators Association) website.

AMEA is a relatively new organization on marine education founded in 2015.

Marine educators from Asia attended the NMEA meeting in Rhode Island, USA in the summer of 2015 to discuss marine educators from Asia. We called for the creation of a gathering of marine educators to promote ocean literacy education. This meeting led to the formation of AMEA. Currently, members are from Korea, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Japan.

　Ocean literacy is defined as "an understanding of the ocean's influence on you and your influence on the ocean. The ocean literacy emphasizes the need to recognize not only the understanding of the ocean, but also what our daily lives give to the ocean.

　Experts have pointed to major global ocean challenges in recent years, including rising sea levels, depletion of fisheries resources, and ocean acidification, and the IPCC has estimated that warming in recent decades has significantly reduced the mass of ice sheets and glaciers, causing sea levels to rise by up to 5.4 meters by 2300. as well as rising at a rate of once every 100 years, and that extreme weather events in the tropics are projected to become more frequent (more than once a year in many places) by 2050.

　To avoid such a situation, the United Nations has designated the period from 2021 to 2030 as the UN Ocean Decade for Sustainable Development (UN Ocean Decade), calling for a concerted effort by multi-stakeholders, including not only researchers but also the general public, companies, and government agencies.

At the same time, the IOC UNESCO (UNESCO Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission), in order to achieve the goal of "The United Nations Decade of Ocean Science", they announced that developing "Ocean Literacy" the ability to understand and utilize the interaction between the ocean and humankind must be needed worldwide. In promoting Ocean Literacy education, people in all positions should increase their intrinsic motivation to solve these problems and take actions by regarding global environmental problems as their own affairs. It is all about developing and practicing an ocean literacy education program for that purpose, developing human resources for leaders, and allocating human resources as soon as possible.

Since the AMEA has directly connected to the UN Ocean Decade as "Ocean Literacy with All" formal program, your individual efforts will play an important role in contributing to ocean literacy education around the world. and by learning from each other on an equal footing, you will be able to produce great results. We look forward to your participation and presentations.

Tsuyoshi Sasaki (PhD.)

President of Asia Marine Educators Association

Professor of Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology