Endowment fund at Nausicaá

Alongside its mission to raise public awareness on issues related to preserving the marine world, Nausicaá has created an endowment fund to support projects centred on the theme of "The Ocean, the Lungs of Mankind".

As a non-profit organisation of public interest, an endowment fund can appeal to the generosity of the public and companies and can grant donors the status of sponsors. All donations collected contribute to financing cultural, educational or natural environment protection structures or projects, as part of a general interest mission.

What is the purpose of a Nausicaá endowment fund?

Nausicaá's endowment fund is a means of furthering its preservation and awareness-raising activities by enlisting the support of sponsors.

In effect, with more than 7 billion people on the planet, our future depends on properly managing the environment, especially the ocean. The ocean covers almost three quarters of the Earth's surface and plays an essential role in the balance of life on Earth. It regulates the climate, stores CO2 and is an invaluable source of food, renewable energy and pharmaceutical solutions.

Preserve our planet for future generations!

Nausicaá invites you to combine our forces for the benefit of the Ocean and Mankind.

Becoming a partner or sponsor is a way of affirming and promoting your values, while at the same time mobilising your employees around a unifying and meaningful project. Depending on the project, different types of collaboration can be envisaged: financial partnership, sponsorship of skills or donations in kind.

As a sponsor of the Nausicaá Endowment Fund, you are entitled to a corporate tax reduction equal to 60% of the amount of the donation, up to a limit of 0.5% of pre-tax revenues.

Become a part of the projects initiated by Nausicaá, propose your project to us, or let's co-construct a project together!

If the Amazon rainforest represents the green lungs of the planet, the oceans are the blue lungs. Not only does the ocean produce 50% of the oxygen we breathe, it is also the largest carbon sink on Earth. The ocean absorbs and stores CO2, a greenhouse gas, thereby limiting global warming.

Nausicaá and its endowment fund are seeking to promote and defend the blue lungs that our oceans, mangroves, underwater meadows and salt marshes represent. The carbon fixed by coastal ocean ecosystems is called "blue carbon".

The objective of this campaign is to support projects to restore "blue carbon sinks" so that the ocean and marine ecosystems will continue to be our "blue lungs".

This means protecting and restoring:

• Mangroves,
• Seagrass beds,
• Salt marshes,
• Coral reefs.

Salt marshes or salt meadows create an oceanic ecosystem that can trap and store CO2 by means of the plants that cover them and by the deep absorption of organic matter in the sediments. 

These ecosystems which also include mangroves, seaweed beds and seagrass beds, can store more than 50% of the carbon in the ocean, even though they represent only 1% of the ocean’s surface area.

Furthermore, salt marshes provide numerous services: they act as a buffer zone between the coastline and the ocean, absorbing wave energy and retaining sediment, which slows down erosion and limits the damage caused by storms, which, according to the latest IPCC report, will be more frequent and more intense in the future.

Salt marshes are also fantastic reservoirs of biodiversity, acting as nurseries for a host of species, thereby replenishing the stock of fish available for fishermen. They filter and improve the quality of the water that they release back into the sea, thereby contributing to the health of other marine ecosystems such as oyster and mussel reefs.

The Hauts-de-France region, with its salt meadows in Canche Bay and Authie Bay, is a particularly interesting area for research.

Nausicaá’s endowment fund will conduct a research project in the Authie Bay estuary. Future developments in the Authie estuary, i.e. polder removal – re-filling the polder with water, represent an opportunity to naturally reclaim wetlands and to combat coastal flooding.

This transformation will increase the surface area covered by salt meadows and will be the topic of a thesis by a doctoral student attached to the Laboratory of Oceanography and Geosciences (LOG) based at the Wimereux Marine Station, focusing on carbon dynamics in salt meadows following the reclamation of the habitat: study of photosynthesis production, mineralisation processes, quantity of carbon stored in sediments in order to produce carbon balances to quantify the influence of salt meadows as carbon traps.

This doctorate will span a period of 3 years.

In 2024, the endowment fund will propose a forum dedicated to young people, with the aim of sending a delegation of young people to the United Nations Ocean Conference organised with Costa Rica in Nice in June 2025.

This youth forum is part of the 2023 agenda for the Sustainable Development Goals, and more specifically SDG 14 (Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development) and the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021 - 2030).

The organisation of this forum will notably draw on the momentum of the Youth4Ocean Forum launched by the European Commission and run by Nausicaá, as well as Youth Environment Europe to mobilise networks of young people around the world.

The Forum, which is intended to be inclusive and representative, will facilitate cross-regional and intergenerational cooperation, identify young people’s priorities for the ocean, promote existing initiatives and provide the guidelines for empowering people to take action for the ocean.

Theme-based workshops are planned for 2024 and in March 2025, five days of seminars will be held at Nausicaá attended by 60 to 100 young people from all over the world.