Kick-off for the German Marine Research Alliance (DAM) in Berlin
"The oceans, as we know them, are massively threatened," as Michael Meister observed very frankly. As parliamentary state secretary at the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, he was explaining the Federal Government's commitment to marine research and the DAM. The goal: "Not only do we want to make excellent research possible; we also want this knowledge to be applied.” | Photo: DAM/Dirk Enters

05/03/2020 | On 3 March, the Ger­man Mar­ine Re­search Al­li­ance (DAM), which counts the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) amongst its members, in­tro­duced it­self to some 200 guests at the FUTURIUM – House of Futures outlining its tasks and ob­ject­ives. As per the DAM mis­sion state­ment, these focus on on pro­mot­ing the sus­tain­able man­age­ment of coasts, seas and oceans through re­search, data man­age­ment and di­git­al­isa­tion, in­fra­struc­ture and know­ledge trans­fer.

Fol­low­ing in­tro­duct­ory words by Mi­chael Meister, par­lia­ment­ary state sec­ret­ary at the Fed­eral Min­istry of Edu­ca­tion and Re­search, and Björn Thümler, the Min­is­ter for Sci­ence and Cul­ture of the State of Lower Sax­ony, the Deputy Chair­man of the DAM, Mi­chael Schulz, out­lined the goals and ob­ject­ives of the Al­li­ance. He em­phas­ized the im­port­ance of the stake­holder forum, which the DAM is set­ting up and which will be its “ac­tual topic gen­er­ator”. This will in­clude poli­cy­makers as well as rep­res­ent­at­ives of busi­ness and civil so­ci­ety.

DAM Auftakt Gruppenbild

Photo: DAM/Dirk Enters

Stake­hold­ers and mar­ine sci­ent­ists then took part in a panel dis­cus­sion en­titled “A Sea of Sus­tain­ab­il­ity – From Know­ledge to Ac­tion”, which was mod­er­ated by met­eor­o­lo­gist and sci­ence journ­al­ist Karsten Schwanke. Norbert Brack­mann, the Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment Co­ordin­ator for the Mari­time In­dustry, Kim Detloff, Head of Mar­ine Pro­tec­tion at Naturs­chutzbund

Deutsch­land e.V., Nicole Du­bilier, Dir­ector of the Max Planck In­sti­tute for Mar­ine Mi­cro­bi­o­logy, Nele Matz-Lück, spokes­wo­man for the Fu­ture Ocean Net­work at Kiel Uni­versity, and Ul­rich Schna­bel, sci­ence ed­itor of DIE ZEIT, dis­cussed trans­dis­cip­lin­ary re­search and de­scribed their ex­pect­a­tions to­wards the DAM.

The mu­si­cians Amoy Ri­bas, Tal Ar­diti and Tino De­rado took the guests of the in­aug­ural event on a mu­sical jour­ney. First they went down­river (“des­cendo o rio”) to the sea, then to the “Krumme Lanke” – a lake that Ber­liners are very fa­mil­iar with. This was fol­lowed by a re­cep­tion at which guests had a chance to ex­change ideas and to net­work un­til late in the even­ing.

 

Contacts

  • Eva Söderman
    Leiterin Presse- und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit / Politische Kommunikation

    Details