Our GO-BC programme team made a return to Vienna, Austria for the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) 2024 this week, with a blue carbon science programme session of posters and talks on Tuesday 16th and Wednesday 17th April, and a GO-BC Town Hall Meeting on the Wednesday evening.

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The EGU24 General Assembly welcomed 20,979 registered attendees, of which 18,388 made their way to Vienna from 116 countries and 2,591 joined online from 109 countries. It was a great success with 18,896 presentations given in 1,044 sessions; 57% of the abstracts were identified as contributions from Early Career Scientists (ECS).

GO-BC partnered to propose a new science session (Vegetated coastal ecosystems: Bridging disciplines to understand blue carbon dynamics under global change) at EGU this year and we were delighted that in its first year, the session attracted the highest number of abstracts for all the Biogeoscience Division sessions.

Our programme was convened by Early Career Scientist, Dr Marie Arnaud (Paris Sorbonne University, France), with co-conveners Carmen Santos (CCMAR, Portugal), Steven Bouillion (KU Leuven, Belgium), Pere Masque-Barri (Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia), and Bill Austin (University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK)

On the evening 17 April, GO-BC hosted a Town Hall Meeting and were delighted to receive sponsorship from LI-COR, who kindly supported a drinks reception for near 100 participants.

The audience enjoyed updates from GO-BC chair (Bill Austin) on the UN Ocean Decade, Marie Arnaud (Paris Sorbonne University) on the new BC session at EGU, Angelo Camerlenghi (JPI-Oceans) on the BC scoping initiative for Europe, Grace Cott (University College Dublin) on behalf of the JPI-Oceans European blue carbon hub, Corne Swart (LI-COR) on behalf of the sponsors, Jana Friedrich (IAEA) on technical capacity and partnerships, and Sung-Ching Lee (Nick) on behalf of the Horizon Europe C-BLUES project.