For Dagny-Elise Anastassiou, chief impact officer at Ava Ocean, the Ocean Green project is an opportunity to help solve a problem seen in waters around the world, with sea urchin proliferation decimating kelp forests.
Having seen how Ava Ocean’s gentle scallop technology could re-open a fishery in the Barents Sea that had been shut for three decades, Anastassiou was confident it could be adapted to other sea life.

Creating value out of nothing

“I come from a research and conservation background and spent many years doing coral restoration and sea grass monitoring in the Caribbean, where I got really into the potential of kelp – especially when I moved back to Europe,” she explains. “Then, when I started with Ava Ocean, we began looking at the potential of not just scallops, but also marine resources lower down the seafood chain.”

Reading about the ‘urgent’ urchin problem in Norway – where some 80% of kelp forests have given way to urchin barrens – Anastassiou felt confident the firm could help. The problem however, was that while there is a market for scallops, the general response to the idea of harvesting urchins was ‘who in their right mind is going to pay us to do this?’

As she dived further into the world of kelp and urchins, Anastassiou says she came to understand that urchins today have no real value. What they needed was a product. But to invest in developing a product, you need to be able to harvest a good supply of urchins. So who goes first? It was a catch-22.

You remove urchins, kelp comes back

“We realised that we have to do it at the same time,” she explains. That was the beginning of the Ocean Green project, where a consortium of partners brings together industry minds, researchers, individuals that have been at the forefront of the urchin problem for decades.

As the project lead, Ava Ocean is key to getting enough urchins out of the water so that the other partners can do their parts in product development or marketing. As well as project coordination and management (work package one), Ava Ocean is the lead on work package two: Novel sea-urchin harvest technology. Having looked at numerous restoration attempts, Anastassiou says “the problem isn’t understanding what happens when urchins are removed: You remove urchins, kelp comes back.

“The issue is finding a large-scale technical solution that can go in shallow waters, that can handle tides and large changes in weather, that can go on uneven, large rocky areas, on bedrock, on sand. You need to be able to handle more than one type of substrate.” At the same time, this technology must be gentle enough and bring minimal disruption.

“It’s not just conservationists and researchers coming to the table,” she continues, pointing out for example that Ava Ocean’s engineer is a diver who comes from the fracking industry. The chicken-and-egg, ‘who goes first’ problem meant Ocean Green needed minds from outside the box – features Anastassiou says makes the project unique – and more likely to succeed.

The two sides of regulation

Today, as Ava Ocean prepares its first pilot harvesters, Anastassiou is working on attracting new sources of funding for Ocean Green, which received 47 million NOK from the Norwegian government’s Green Platform to run for three years. She feels that regulation is going to galvanise businesses to get involved.

“The EU Nature Restoration Law came into play this year and that is a pretty big game changer,’ she says. ‘We’re going to see a lot of interest and we’re going to see a lot more funding become available – and it always comes down to funding.”

The flip side is that regulation around conservation is also set to pose challenges. “If an urchin barren is inside a marine conservation area, what does that mean for potential restoration efforts,” she wonders. “We’re talking about restoration by starting a new fishery. That’s not been done before.”

Ava Ocean, which is leading the project, is responsible for developing technology to gently but efficiently harvest urchins; NIBIO and Akvaplan-niva are fronting the research and development of urchin-derived products; Hofseth Biocare will be responsible for the marketing- efforts of those products. Wandering Owl contribute expertise to meet the social impacts elements of Ocean Green.