Nick Wise

Business leader, Connector, Entrepreneur, Environmentalist, Idea generator, Social entrepreneur, Technologist

We face a global crisis. Seafood feeds 3 billion people and supports the livelihood of 12% of the world’s population, yet with 30% of the world’s fisheries overfished and 60% fished to the limits of sustainability, food security and poverty are serious concerns. On top of this, illegal fishing is associated with a range of other crimes including human trafficking and slavery, causing misery and suffering for thousands of people. Nick Wise is founder and CEO of OceanMind, a non-profit organisation dedicated to protecting the world’s oceans. Using satellites and artificial intelligence, OceanMind powers effective fisheries enforcement and enables more responsible seafood sourcing, increasing compliance and sustainability. Building on this success, OceanMind is now developing AI to detect modern slavery on the oceans, particularly in fisheries, and to detect the desecration of war graves through unauthorised undersea salvage. Nick has been designing large scale, highly secure software solutions for over 20 years, using innovative techniques focused on market needs. Before joining the ranks of social entrepreneurship, Nick’s journey saw him starting an Internet security business, as CTO of a mature SME, and managing product development in a billion-dollar multinational. As a DRK Entrepreneur, Nick now empowers people to solve global issues with technology.

Our Planet

The ocean takes almost a third of our emissions out of the atmosphere each year and has consistently done so over decades. Without this buffer we would already be experiencing the worst projected consequences of global warming. The ocean has given us a grace period within which we can still act. But this comes with catastrophic risks. The ocean provides essential ecosystem services that humanity needs to survive, including food, fresh water, and oxygen, as well as regulating processes for the whole planet. Not only is ocean health declining due to climate change, human activity is destroying ecosystems and driving extinction. Overfishing, destructive fishing, mining, dredging, anchoring, sewage discharge, agricultural and surface run-off, and pollution are just some of our actions that are killing the ocean. As ocean health declines, so does its ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere. We are coming close to crossing tipping points where planetary scale processes we depend on to survive such as oceanic circulation, climate regulation, the water cycle, will be disrupted. Massive reserves of historical greenhouse gases could be released back into the atmosphere. As we act against climate change, we must not be single minded in tackling emissions. We must also protect the planetary ecosystems that give us life. We must stop harming the ocean through our actions, so that it can continue to provide for us. Fortunately, all of these damaging activities are already regulated. The challenge is enforcing these complex regulations on the vast, wild ocean. What is out of sight, is often out of mind. The men and women responsible for enforcing maritime regulations, the last line of defence of our ocean, work under harsh conditions, with limited resources, facing complex situations, outmanned, ill-equipped, and often blinded to the committed efforts of a confederation of lawbreakers to break the rules and destroy what the oceans provide. OceanMind changes the game, making the invisible, visible, and the unknown, known. Using satellites, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, OceanMind’s advanced technology sifts through the swarm of human activity on the ocean every second, understands who is working legally, and who is violating the rules of ocean use. Our team of ocean experts deliver this intelligence to maritime regulators, together with recommendations, training, and capacity building to ensure that they can take effective action against non-compliance. Today we work with governments in Southeast Asia, Central America, Canada, Europe, and the UK, as well as INTERPOL, and regional enforcement bodies. OceanMind’s system is designed to operate at the planetary scale. Over the next 2 years we will be scaling our operations to match to form an International Ocean Intelligence Service, in order to tackle damaging human activity globally. We can’t afford to wait any longer, the time to act is now.

AI, Oceans, Satellites, Technology

Helping others to do good using technology.