Pierre BAHUREL is the Director of Mercator Ocean International. Graduated from Ecole Polytechnique and HEC, he has worked on spatial altimetry, modelling and data assimilation applied to operational oceanography and was one of the founders of Mercator Ocean in 1995, which he has managed and developed ever since. For the last twenty-five years, Pierre's main activities have been linked to operational oceanography at national, European and international levels. He has brought together a large community of expert organisations in Europe to build and manage the marine service of the European Union's Copernicus programme, which today successfully serves more than 500,000 users worldwide, and he further supports the European Commission in its blue diplomacy (G7 FSOI, Future of the Seas and Oceans Initiative). Under his leadership, Mercator Ocean became "Mercator Ocean International", a scientific organisation of general interest with ten shareholders from 5 European countries (France, Spain, Italy, Norway and the United Kingdom) and five years later, at the One Ocean Summit (February 2022), began its process of transformation into an intergovernmental organisation dedicated to ocean forecasting and digital oceanography. Pierre is preparing the digital ocean of tomorrow by leading the global OceanPrediction Decade Collaborative Centre of the UNESCO Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission's Decade of Ocean Sciences, and by piloting the EU's Digital Ocean Twin, called for by President Ursula von der Leyen as part of the EU's Mission to "regenerate our oceans and waters by 2030". He is working alongside Olivier Poivre d'Arvor, Ambassador for the Poles and Maritime Issues, on preparations for the next United Nations Ocean Conference 2025, to be held in Nice in June 2025.