Katherine Knight reflects on the progress already made with BSAC’ s Marine Champions project
ENVIRONMENT
Marine Champions
The story so far
Katherine Knight reflects on the progress already made with BSAC’ s Marine Champions project
I
wanted to take a moment to reflect on the process that has been the launch of BSAC’ s Marine Champions initiative. It feels like only a brief moment ago that the Environment Committee first suggested the idea. Right from the start, empowering BSAC’ s grassroots membership to take action felt like the right thing to do.
Once the decision was made, it was all systems go. Before we knew it, we had the name Marine Champions and a bright, shiny logo. If you have a logo it must be real, right. We were ready to go, but we still faced the biggest unknown- would anyone actually sign up?
The first social media post went out, a toe in the soft-launch water. A frisson of excitement and a little trepidation. Would anyone see it? And if so, would anyone respond? A ping in the inbox and we had our first Marine Champion. Then we had five. I felt more confident that this was going to be something that people wanted to do. SCUBA magazine shared
We’ re going to need a bigger bin bag- beach cleaning in Scotland the initiative and within a handful of weeks we had passed the 50 Marine Champions milestone.
Now I was convinced that there was a whole army of folks in the BSAC community ready to take action for the environment, and that Marine Champions was going to be something special. This was reinforced by our first online webinar where we had a fantastic evening with our first chance to meet virtually.
This meeting included an inspirational presentation from Debbie Powell on Motion for the Ocean bsac. com / m4to and its mission to help all local governments recognise that the world’ s oceans are fundamental to climate regulation, ensuring that local Councils commit to supporting a more ecologically healthy sea and to rethink how the ocean is taken into account in planning and decision-making at local level. The Marine Champions demonstrated their passion and the power of their voices, with six going to their councils to promote Motion for the Ocean right after the meeting.
Having initially set ourselves the goal of 50 Marine Champions by the end of the year, it was wonderful to be able to announce that Andy Torbet was joining the team as marine champion number 50. So what are we going to do now that we have reached the magic number? First of all we want to make sure that we give time and energy to supporting the amazing community who have signed up so far. We will be focussing on delivering a programme of webinars, training opportunities and I am especially looking forward to meeting up in person at the Go Diving Show.
But that doesn’ t mean that we will be stopping at 50. We will continue to grow the Marine Champions community. If you are interested in becoming part of the movement, you can find out more information about the programme and how to sign up here bsac. com / marinechampions
Regardless of whether you are signed up as a Marine Champion there are still lots of ways that you can get involved in helping the ocean. Happily some of these are well suited to the colder, darker months. Why not write to your councillor and encourage them to pass a Motion for the Ocean- all the resources and even including letter templates can be found at the same link as above: bsac. com / m4to
BSAC also has some great ocean conservation training resources, allowing you to develop your skills as a Shore Surveyor [ see bsac. com / shoresurveyor ] or Underwater Surveyor bsac. com / underwatersurveyor ready to explore the oceans in 2026 with a newly inquisitive outlook.
As you think about what you are going to do to in 2026 to move the oceans towards recovery, rest assured that whatever action you choose to take, it is a valuable contribution. As the saying goes, the vast ocean is made up of individual drops.
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