Gender and the Ocean: World Oceans Day at the IAEA Environment Laboratories
Every year the United Nations commemorates World Oceans Day to mark the importance of the oceans in our everyday lives. The focus of this year's World Oceans Day is 'Gender and the Ocean.' At the IAEA Environment Laboratories, women and men work side by side to help Member States use nuclear techniques to characterize some of the environmental threats our oceans face. Women and men equally make up half of the staff members at the Laboratories, including at the Section Head level. Pictured here are staff during IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano's visit in September 2016.
The only marine laboratories of the United Nations system, the IAEA Environment Laboratories assist Member States in training scientists, conducting sampling missions and cutting-edge research. Three of the four laboratories focus on oceans and are located in Monaco — the Radiometrics Laboratory (RML), the Marine Environmental Studies Laboratory (MESL) and the Radioecology Laboratory (REL).
The work of the Environment Laboratories includes analyses and studies conducted to assist the Government of Japan in ensuring that its sea area monitoring around the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant maintains a high quality and is comprehensive, credible and transparent. The IAEA collected samples from the sea near the plant multiple times between 2014 and 2018. The IAEA subsequently confirmed the reliability of data obtained by the Japanese laboratories regularly monitoring the level of radionuclides in the seawater, sediment and fish samples there.
A hallmark collaboration of the IAEA Environment Laboratories is the Mediterranean Action, which trains scientists, both men and women, from the Mediterranean region in monitoring organic and inorganic pollutants. The initiative is part of a larger and longstanding partnership with UN Environment (UNEP).
In fact, in 2016, UNEP and the IAEA marked the 30-year anniversary of their collaboration, which started in 1986 when the IAEA set up the Marine Environmental Studies Laboratory (MESL) within the Environment Laboratories to act as a specialised coordinating centre for the Regional Seas Programmes. The gender distribution of MESL in the period between 2008 and 2018 was 36% male and 64% female.
The ocean provides a vital service to our planet through its capacity to regulate atmospheric CO<sub>2</sub> levels and thereby limits climate change and its impacts. However, a small change in the fluxes to the ocean carbon pool could impact the ocean's storage capacity and in turn impact atmospheric CO<sub>2</sub> levels. The IAEA works with national experts to gain a better understanding of the carbon cycle processes and stocks of carbon which experts can then use to predict the impacts of climate change.
Another ongoing project at the Environment Laboratories is the IAEA Ocean Acidification International Coordination Centre, tasked with addressing increasing concerns about ocean acidification and coordinating sustained international cooperation. Over the last five years, the project has grown in scale and complexity as IAEA Member States have sought to improve their understanding of how increasing ocean acidification may affect their livelihoods and their ability to report on target 3 of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 14, which specifically addresses ocean acidification.
In recent years, there has been an increase in the severity, frequency and geographical range of harmful algal blooms (HABs), which can produce biotoxins linked to mass mortalities in fish and birds and cause foodborne illnesses in humans through the consumption of contaminated seafood. The IAEA assists national experts in the use of nuclear and isotopic techniques to monitor biotoxins in the environment and in seafood as well as to study historical trends in harmful algal blooms.
On this World Oceans Day, the IAEA Environment Laboratories affirm the importance of gender equality in the work of tackling today’s environmental problems.
