Pascal Alphonse (E13): “We’re Beginning a Journey to Regenerate the Oceans”

Pascal Alphonse (E13) is at the helm of the Phoenix project, a sail-powered journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific to support groups that are working to regenerate marine ecosystems. 

ESSEC Alumni: Can you tell us about the Phoenix project?

Pascal Alphonse: The project is a journey by sailing boat from Brest to San Diego – almost 10,000 nautical miles – between February and June 2022, to help regenerate the ocean. My crew and I will meet, film and help people who are working to replant mangroves and seagrass beds as well as to restore coral reefs and kelp forests. These ecosystems are the planet’s largest carbon sinks and biodiversity hotspots.

EA: Your goal is to raise awareness among the general public just as much as it is to take concrete action… 

P. Alphonse: Yes – we’re on the “solutions” side, a catalyst and accelerator for existing restoration methods. We want to oil the wheels of the budding “blue carbon” sector, by facilitating synergies between professions, by putting local stakeholders in contact with potential investors, by accelerating their own communication, and more. 

EA: Who is supporting the project? 

P. Alphonse: We’re supported by the Fondation de la Mer thanks to Sabine Roux de Bézieux (E86), as well as by the social enterprise Tenaka, the international NGO Sustainable Ocean Alliance, and Septentrion Environnement as our scientific partner. The crew itself will be made up of two young women and two young men, all fully aware of the need to help science and all convinced that we must unite businesses, NGOs, foundations and public authorities to support those who are working in the field to help nature regain its resilience where it cannot do it alone. 

EA: What will the main steps of your journey be?

P. Alphonse: Firstly, we’ve firmly rooted our project in the Brittany region, in our home port of Brest, by working – even before we set off – with a team of scientists from IFREMER, led by Stéphane Pouvreau, which restores what were once the equivalent of coral reefs in Europe: flat oyster reefs, which lined our shores over thousands of kilometres from the Netherlands to Spain, with an incredible level of biodiversity and similar biological roles to their tropical cousins. 

EA: Then you’ll head for the Canaries…

P. Alphonse: Yes – there we’ll meet the people behind the Seastore project to restore seagrass beds. Despite covering just 0.2% of the ocean floor, seagrass beds sequester 10% of the ocean’s dissolved carbon in the form of sediments – twice as much as terrestrial forests. The problem is that in 50 years, around 30% of seagrass beds have disappeared, and this disappearance is continuing at a rate of almost 1.5% per year. I don’t know if readers will understand what this means: the first marine plant life appeared on Earth 1.2 billion years ago – a thousand times longer ago than the first homo sapiens – and in the equivalent of a fraction of a second on the timeline of life on Earth, we have had a huge impact on this branch of the tree of life.

EA: What initiatives will you support afterwards? 

P. Alphonse: We’ll cross the Atlantic to support coral and mangrove restoration projects in the French West Indies, working in particular with the charity L’Asso-Mer in Martinique and the St Martin Nature Reserve. Mangroves capture between two and four times as much carbon dioxide per hectare as terrestrial tropical forests. They are also the primary nurseries for tropical coastal fish species and protect coastlines from erosion. And yet in 50 years, around 40% of mangroves have been destroyed. 

EA: What about coral? 

P. Alphonse: Coral covers just 0.2% of the sea floor, but it accounts for a quarter of all marine biodiversity. There are over 2500 species of coral, supporting several million other species. And 30% of coral reefs have died since the 1980s, while 90% of the remaining coral reefs are at serious risk of extinction under the combined effect of global warming, ocean acidification and pollution. 

EA: After crossing Panama, you’ll head to Costa Rica…

P. Alphonse: More specifically, we’ll reach the Guanacaste Conservation Area, where we will film the work of a charity that, working hand in hand with local fishermen, will help to bring hectares of mangroves back to life, because they have understood that these ecosystems are also what underpin their work, and in turn their economy. Finally, we will come back up the east Pacific coast and travel to Mexico and California to meet the people behind SPORA, a project to restore underwater forests of kelp, the giant seaweed several metres high that serves as a shelter for endemic fauna, with unrivalled biomass per m². 

EA: Why were these projects chosen? 

P. Alphonse: The majority remain poorly known: we wanted to make the general public aware of them and offer them outreach material (in the form of professional video). Indirectly, it could also help them to receive public subsidies or private funding. It’s time the corporate world tackled these issues: saving living creatures and keeping warming below 2°C won’t be possible without direct and effective action that only companies are able to take. 

EA: How can companies get involved in these issues – and more specifically in your initiative?

P. Alphonse: We’re planning to move beyond the model of sponsorship that’s more common in the world of sport. Yes, we will give visibility to each partner that follows us, but our partners will also need to become ambassadors for ocean regeneration. It’s no longer a question of salving your conscience while looking to boost sales: companies have to look further than their annual results and understand that if they don’t change things around in the next 30 or 50 years, they’ll have other problems to manage – more urgent problems than the marketing impact of this or that product on this or that market. It’s also a conviction that we share with our founding partner Tenaka, which offers businesses custom-tailored CSR programmes to rebuild their own coral reef or their own mangrove – a project that offers real benefits with no greenwashing! Similarly, the Fondation de la Mer has launched a large-scale programme, SOS Corail, a fixed crowdfunding platform for sponsors or businesses, and we are going to be ambassadors for it.

EA: How do you apply the need for zero carbon to your own journey?

P. Alphonse: Sailing (in a sailing boat that’s been in service for 25 years) is a fairly sustainable method of transport in itself. But we’re going further by using solar energy for our on-board electricity, and by allocating a portion of donations we receive to the projects that we’ll showcase – so the journey itself is contributing to regeneration. 

EA: How will you use what you learn from your journey?

P. Alphonse: During the journey, we’ll post a web series on YouTube and educational articles on social media to inform as many people as we can about these issues. We hope that this will allow us to reach a wide range of employees, entrepreneurs, and economic stakeholders at all levels, in turn sparking interest and engagement from their management or teams. We’re also setting up an educational programme with graduate and primary schools so we can interact directly with the pupils and students before and during our adventure. Scientific institutes and public stakeholders such as the French Agency for Biodiversity are also involved. These stakeholders already do amazing work educating people in reserves and national parks, in particular via educational marine protected areas: all they need to do is incorporate ecosystem restoration methods wherever possible. 

EA: And afterwards? 

P. Alphonse: We plan to publish a book that will cover all of the techniques we learn and make them widely known. And we would like to continue to develop Phoenix, firstly by completing our world tour, and secondly by creating a tool that would allow companies to commit to projects of this type more easily – a sort of matchmaking app with an interactive map and real-time tracking of regeneration measures. We could perhaps base it on the Fondation de la Mer’s SOS Corail solution or the Tenaka Science tool. Watch this space!

EA: Beyond your journey, what goals do you believe need to be achieved in ocean protection? 

P. Alphonse: The “blue carbon” network needs to become just as closely linked to the global “carbon offsetting” market as ecosystems on land. Earth is very poorly named: our planet’s resilience is much more reliant on the ocean than it is on the continents. And supporting the regeneration of life is one of the solutions that work to tackle the environmental crisis. A team of top scientists recently published an important article on this topic in the journal Nature, entitled Rebuilding Marine Life, which gives an overview of the issue around the world and concludes on a very optimistic note... as long as we don’t waste any more time – and as long as we start by bringing an end to all destruction. What’s more, alongside its decade of ocean science, the United Nations has just launched the decade on ecosystem restoration, in which the sea necessarily plays a major role as it covers over 70% of the globe.

EA: How can the ESSEC community support your work?

P. Alphonse: You’ve got right to the heart of the matter… Of course, you can make a donation at any time via our site or via the Fondation de la Mer. Your donations will allow us both to maximise the money we give to the regeneration project of our choice and to finalise our preparations for the journey. You can also help us a lot simply by sharing our latest news with your network. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the ESSEC community, which has already done a lot for us. My special thanks to the friends I met 10 years ago in Cergy, as well as ESSEC Alumni and the Reflets Magazine team, which gave me the opportunity to share the cover with Sabine Roux de Bézieux a year ago: without that meeting, this journey may never well have seen the light of day. The spirit that drives Phoenix is closely linked to the values and teachings of ESSEC: the strength of entrepreneurship, commitment to meaningful projects, and the power of working as part of a network. Thank you, everyone!

Interview by Louis Armengaud Wurmser (E10), Content Manager at ESSEC Alumni

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