PARIS — The European Union wants to plug a gaping hole in ocean research left behind by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.
The trouble is, it has a lot less cash to splash.
Last week, the European Commission launched the “OceanEye” program, which aims to make the EU “a global leader in ocean intelligence” by investing in critical ocean observation technologies and data collection on how oceans evolve.
It came two weeks after the U.S. National Science Foundation — a government agency that funds science in the U.S. — said it would dismantle its own $368 million ocean observation network and remove “all in-water infrastructure” on parts of its coastline. These machines provide crucial data on oceanic systems and how they react to climate change.
Three weeks before that, the Trump administration had fired the NSF’s independent board, continuing a trend of withdrawing science funding and canceling environmental programs.
U.S. funding withdrawal comes at a critical time, when accelerating global warming is posing new risks to ocean systems, the highest-profile of which is to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC — the ocean conveyor belt that keeps Europe warm.
The U.S. decision to take some of its data collection infrastructure offline is “a point of concern,” because Europe’s ocean monitoring and simulation systems partly rely on it to understand how the AMOC current is evolving, said Pierre Bahurel, general director of Mercator Ocean International, the ocean monitoring and data provider currently running the EU’s Copernicus Marine Service.
Europe’s announcement that it would step up its funding, just as the U.S. withdrew its own, prompted praise. However, Brussels is hoping to make it happen with a much smaller budget than the U.S. To kickstart the program, the Commission will use €92 million from its €95 billion cash pot for research called Horizon Europe — a quarter of the size of the U.S. ocean observation network’s funding.
“We should accept good news when it comes,” said Olivier Poivre d’Arvor, French Ambassador for the Arctic and Antarctic poles and maritime issues. “The resources dedicated by the European Commission must seriously increase, and at least now there is a line of credit that exists.”
The EU itself is calling on other countries and regions to step up observation.
“Due to the complicated nature of ocean observation, no single country or region can observe the ocean alone. This must be a global effort with diplomacy at its forefront,” said the European Commissioner for Oceans Costas Kadis at the Neptune Forum, an event on ocean exploration and diplomacy held in Paris on Monday.
OceanEye is part of the EU’s Ocean Pact, a plan to improve the ocean’s health and boost the bloc’s maritime economic and security interests as human-caused climate change continues to disrupt oceanic currents, water temperatures and fish stocks.
In June 2025 the Commission had said that a third of the €1 billion budget for the Ocean Pact would go towards scientific projects.
Some point to the technological overlap between ocean monitoring systems and more tech-savvy sectors, such as space innovation, as a way to explore other funding avenues. “There is a lot of money in the space sector right now [and] in digital technology,” said Bahurel.
In depth, scientific ocean observation relies on “a system for monitoring, describing, and observing the ocean, where we use satellites, measurements at sea, and digital systems,” he added. “We absolutely have an interest, if we want to access the necessary level of funding, to view things holistically.”
Mercator Ocean International is also working to build a European “digital twin” of the ocean to help both the private and public sectors understand how the ocean responds to various events, from plastic pollution to rising temperatures.