An actress, a sports teacher: Séverine and Stéphane had the opportunity to share their eco-adventures on their paddleboards along the nearby Marne with students from Sainte-Marie middle school-high school in Meaux on December 8th, 2023, and to discuss the importance of protecting water. Several classes of 8th grade, and just over a hundred teenagers, were able to react to the photographs they were shown, which also highlighted the importance of reconnecting with our physical sensations, emotions & imagination, to reflect together on a healthier future.
10 years of actions, excursions, awareness-raising and mobilization around water protection, Watertrek was delighted to celebrate its 10 years of existence in the company of many of its Parisian supporters, partners and volunteers on December 8th.
Born at the counter of the Paris boat show bar in 2013 following a conversation with Yann N'Guyen, Marketing Director of Naish France, it was at the bottom of Notre-Dame, on the Seine and on the water that we blew out our candles! Many thanks to the barge Le Son de la Terre for its warm welcome.
Around fifty plastic bottles, imposing pieces of polystyrene, a car bumper... 3 bags filled with around 130 liters of waste were collected in 3 hours on the - despite everything - very beautiful Seclin canal around Lille. Our co-founder Séverine was welcomed by the local EcosupExplorers crew. Covered with 80% of duckweed, plastic bottles are particularly visible and easy to collect...and they're terribly numerous. Considering the very important amount of waste observed and collected, we decided - in addition to our Plastic Origins surveys - to alert local authorities about the quality of the water and the large pieces observed.
Watertrek has joined Plastic Pollution Coalition, a global alliance of more than 1,200 organizations in 75 countries working toward a more equitable world free of plastic pollution and its toxic impact on waterways, oceans, and the environment.
PPC is currently working with Hollywood industries to raise awareness on plastic and waste representation in TV series through its initiative «Flip the script on plastic». The aim is to develop new narratives and gestures on screen, a very inspiring endeavor indeed.
Creation of a steering committee to tackle upstream waste
Since 2021, Watertrek is part of a dedicated steering committee - COPIL Voies de transfert - established by the French Ministry of Ecological Transition. Members work together to address upstream pollution, with the aim of significantly reducing plastic waste carried to the sea.
As a result, Watertrek operates collectively with other associations, government agencies, and relevant stakeholders, following the French road map “Zero plastic waste in the sea 2025”, and the European Directive “Strategy for the marine environment. (DCSMM).
This synergy serves to better tackle river plastic waste which largely contributes to 80 % of sea pollution.
To ensure efficiency and alignment in the work completed, meetings take place once to twice a year.
Former US Vice President Al Gore and all his team from the Climate Reality Project were in Europe this June 2018 to offer a workshop on climate solutions, providing an opportunity for Séverine - co-founder of Watertrek - to widen her knowledge. More than 700 people from all over the world met in the Hotel Maritim, right in the heart of Berlin, from 26 till 28 June to join 3 days of conferences, workshops and meetings. Themes were sometimes very sharp: "Climate and migration", "Raising ambition in Europe", with a particular focus on the host country - Germany - and its essential transition (with Poland) from coal.
The heart of the program remains the impressive presentation delivered by Vice President Al Gore, both in its extensive version of 2:45 hours, and its short version: 10 minutes. Associating cards, figures, diagrams, photos, videos of the main fires, droughts, storms, rains, heat and cold waves undergone all around the world, Al Gore provides an extremely well documented view of the current situation, allowing us to see links between events which can sometimes seem isolated.
If his factual report is obviously alarming - it also presents some very effective and virtuous initiatives to fight the climatic disorder. Climate leaders are then invited to take ownership of the material - all the resources are accessible - to go and speak in their own community.
Our co-founder Séverine took the floor during the inaugural Ecogames Paris 2018 conference organized on June 5th by Didier Lehenaff in the City hall of Paris 10th district, within the framework of the World Environment Day.
" All equal ": how can sport contribute to social and environmental equity today? This is the question she tried to answer, reminding us that facing climate change, we might be more equal - and vulnerable - than we believe, but also that environmental education - and water preservation - remains often issues dealt by females. Food for thought.
Watertrek was officially hosted for 3 days in Romania by a delegation of stand-up paddlers determined to promote their practice, stand for cleaner rivers, and design a possible conservation project for the Donau.
Doctor Florin Paun and his wife Ingrid - both French residents with a Rumanian background - had invited Mathieu and Séverine from Watertrek as well as Stéphane from Sup Passion to meet numerous local athletes and go paddle in unexpected places. We were the first to ever paddle downtown Bucharest - thanks to Ministry of Sports - as well as on the Snargov lake, known to host the National Center for Olympic Sports, as well as the tomb of famous Vlad Dracul, also named Dracula.
Dr Florin Paun - an expert in aerospace and innovation - was the first man to bring SUP to the Donau Delta 5 years ago and gave his two boards to the local club Fit and Funny run by Razvan Marinescu so he could offer free sessions to the children of the villages along the Black Sea coast.
Florin and Ingrid also launched the initiative " Stand-up for Clean Mountains & Rivers " and have tried to educate their relatives and friends about plastic pollution. The idea of an European Sup relay was mentioned, as Romania will chair the European Commission in 2019.
Huge thanks to Mister Ioan Denes, Ministry for Water and Forests; to Victor Sandu, Managing Director of Rumanian Waters ANAR ; to Adela Alexe, Director of the Training center Baza in Snagov, and to Madam Gabriela Firea, Mayor of Bucharest, for their warm welcome.
On the initiative of Francesca Santoro - Head of the UNESCO Regional Office in Venice - Watertrek was invited in December 2017 to join the "Ocean Literacy for All" Conference and present a non-formal education case.
For 2 days, elected officials and institutions, such as Gesine Meissner (Member of the European Parliament), Peter Thomson (Special Envoy for Oceans at the UN), Officials and University curriculum managers, as well as representatives of associations were able to present their work and practices implemented to promote oceanographic knowledge. The aim was to explore ways to make this knowledge accessible for all. Watertrek - alongside his partner Surfrider and in the person of its cofounder Séverine - was able to present his initiatives during a twenty-minute intervention in the heart of the Venetian capital.
After those two days of presentation and interaction, working groups were formed to put in place a medium-term strategy. Watertrek has thus invested in a group in charge of the implementation of a proposal for a law to make oceanographic knowledge compulsory in schools, a great starting point for new synergies and a thorough work to deepen in the coming months, especially since the UN approved in December 2017 the proposal of the IOC-UNESCO "International Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development".
On the conference:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEeVTTV8Noc
On the UN oceans decade:https://en.unesco.org/ocean-decade
