HUB Ocean is an independent, non-profit and non-compete foundation, with the mission to change the fate of the ocean by unleashing the power of data, technology and collaboration.
Established in 2019 by the World Economic Forum network of Fourth Industrial Revolution Centers, and the Aker Group, it is the first thematic center dedicated to unlocking and sharing ocean data.
HUB Ocean is a partner community developing a ground-breaking data platform – the Ocean Data Platform launched in 2019 – as well as applications and tools that pilot new approaches to ocean governance. HUB Ocean is growing rapidly and today is a 18 global partner ecosystem, including Mercuria who in May 2021 began an important strategic partnership with HUB Ocean.
The core of what HUB Ocean does is the Ocean Data Platform, a global, open-source, and integrated digital data ecosystem. It has been built to rapidly contextualize historical, live, and simulated big data, to pilot and support new data-driven tools between scientists, decision-makers, industrial players and the public.
The Ocean Data Platform contains extensive ocean data sets including the World Ocean Database (WOD) – the world’s largest publicly available collection of uniformly formatted, and quality controlled ocean profile data that dates back to Captain Cook’s journey in 1772.
Along with large open source datasets, industrial data will also be available, for a powerful fusion of data, which users can pull through API for more transparent and layered analysis.
The Ocean Data Platform is an open collaborative tool that unlocks and aggregates ocean data to encourage scientific collaboration, industry transparency and regulatory power with the goal to heal the ocean.
It provides a single place for aggregated data, cross-source, cloud-based data analysis, and a platform for data sharing and collaboration tools.
In May 2021, Mercuria joined C4IR Ocean – the World Economic Forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the former name of HUB Ocean – to increase fleet emission data transparency. Companies rarely share their emission data beyond the minimum required by regulation, which varies all over the world. This makes it challenging to calculate the emissions of the world fleet.
As a progressive industry player, we actively and consistently operate with our responsibility to contribute to the improvement of the environment, particularly relating to our global oceans. In order to really make substantial changes to protect our oceans, we need to fully understand the impact that different factors have on them. As such, we are proud to participate in such an important project by increasing the transparency of our shipping data, and sharing it with HUB Ocean’s flagship project, the Ocean Data Platform. HUB Ocean and Mercuria have a common commitment to improving ocean productivity and health, and this important work will help to ensure that there is transparency and visibility into causes and effects of what is happening to our oceans.
Mercuria and our Minerva Bunkering subsidiary contribute to the Ocean Data Platform via our expertise as users of, and suppliers to, the global shipping market, and as owners of a vessel fleet. For example, we are able to share fuel data from the fleet of ships and tankers that we operate to contribute to the Next Generation Shipping Emissions Tracking application and allow the models to be tuned against real world data using machine learning techniques.
Kimberly Mathisen / CEO, HUB Ocean
HUB Ocean is looking to connect with a wide range of partners, ocean industries, NGOs, academics, policy & regulators, and others passionate about the ocean.
