September 2024

This month, the HYYM team supported the Great British Beach Clean, attended an international conference and data from the HYYM project was used as evidence in the Senedd!

Great British Beach Clean

To support the Great British Beach Clean, five beach cleans were carried out through the HYYM project – four of which were led by amazing community members. One Ocean Forum member Katie Todd, local primary school Ysgol Christchurch, local college Pengwern College and Bionet, the Local Nature Partnership for North East Wales all helped collect important data on litter pollution which will feed into the Marine Conservation Society’s long-running dataset.

Credit: Daniel Price

One Ocean Forum

We held our sixth One Ocean Forum meeting in Rhyl Football Club – a new venue for us! Since it was a lovely sunny day, we were able to host one of the Forum activities outside on the pitch!

Credit: Ciara Taylor

We worked on co-designing the guide to ocean literacy, the final version of which can now be downloaded in English and in Welsh. The Forum shared ideas on the purpose, audience and key messages of the guide, and the actions that we would hope for people to take after reading the guide. Co-designing all of our ocean literacy resources with the Forum means we can truly create effective and collaborative outputs.

We also began to plan the future of the Forum. With only two Forum meetings remaining, Forum members started to think about how they would want to keep working in their communities beyond the official end of the HYYM project in March 2025.

Credit: Ciara Taylor

European Marine Science Educators Association (EMSEA) Conference

HYYM team members Ciara Taylor and Ffion Mitchell Langford travelled to Croatia for the EMSEA Conference to present project findings and spread the word of the HYYM project to an international audience. Conference delegates were interested in the HYYM projects’ community engagement methods, use of co-design, and production of bilingual ocean literacy resources.

Ffion and Ciara HYYM team with EMSEA conference delegates

Credit: EMSEA conference delegate, 2024

HYYM data in the Senedd

Policy and Advocacy Manager at the Marine Conservation Society, Chloe Wenman, used data from the HYYM project whilst giving evidence at the Senedd. This was a particularly exciting moment for the HYYM team that our data and findings were being used at a national scale to inform policy.