SeaWilding Conference 2025

Thursday 23 October 2025 - Saturday 25 October 2025

Location: Barcelona, Spain

SeaWilding 2025 is Spain’s first large-scale interdisciplinary conference where researchers, experts, and key stakeholders in ocean conservation and restoration come together to drive transformative development in this field.

PML’s Ana Queirós, Climate Change Lead at the laboratory, is an invited speaker at the UN Ocean Decade endorsed conference, and will her talk will focus on Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) and climate-smart MSP as means to deliver effective conservation and promote climate action through conservation and restoration.

Ana is an internationally recognised, award winning marine climate change ecologist, leading and advising on a number of globally distributed transdisciplinary research programmes, co-developing capability and evidence-based solutions for climate-smart ocean management that works for nature and people towards sustainable development.

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Abstract – Professor Ana Queirós at SeaWilding:

We have just five years left to meet Targets 2 and 3 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework: restoring and protecting 30% of the ocean by 2030. The challenge is twofold: how do we hit these goals on time, and how do we make sure the solutions we put in place continue to work in the long run?

Right now, ocean life faces a dangerous combination of threats—from human activities like overfishing and pollution to the impacts of climate change. Current conservation efforts haven’t kept up with the scale or speed of these pressures. At the same time, traditional policy-making, both nationally and internationally, moves too slowly to meet the 2030 deadline.

In this talk, I will share new approaches we’ve been developing in the UK and extending to Europe and the UK Overseas Territories. These advances show that scientists and conservationists can’t do this alone. Working together—across sectors and disciplines—is essential.

A powerful way forward is knowledge co-production: researchers, policymakers, communities, and other partners identifying problems together, carrying out research, and co-creating solutions. This participatory approach ensures that the tools, data, and evidence we generate are informed by, and directly useful, for decision-makers.

By collaborating in this way, we can speed up climate-smart, evidence-based action and give ourselves the best chance of reaching the 2030 ocean protection targets.