An underwater photographer wearing the Blancpain Bathyscaphe Flyback Chronograph. Image by Harald Hois

Swiss watch brand Blancpain has long championed the exploration and conservation of our oceans through their Bathyscaphe range of innovative underwater timepieces. Chloe Frost-Smith takes a closer look at the collection’s newest additions

Widely recognised as the luxury watchmaker for the underwater world, explorers, oceanographers and underwater photographers have worn Blancpain since their creation of the first modern diver’s watch, Fifty Fathoms, in 1953. The Swiss brand’s latest additions to the Bathyscaphe line delve into its deep-sea history while continuing its long-standing commitment to the protection of the oceans.

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The Bathyscaphe Day Date Desert Edition and the Bathyscaphe Flyback Chronograph introduce an earthy aesthetic into the collection’s previously nautical palette, with two new colours in beige and green featuring on the strap and face of each model respectively.

The Bathyscaphe Flyback Chronograph

While the sandy tones of the Day Date Desert Edition might not immediately conjure up a connection to the ocean, they have been designed to evoke the Nevada Desert where Ernest H. Brooks II, a pioneer of underwater photography and contributor to the Edition Fifty Fathoms project, made a spectacular dive in 1962. Descending into the depths of Devils Hole in the infamous Death Valley in Nevada, Brooks photographed an endangered species of pupfish exclusively found in the Devils waters for the first time.

The Bathyscaphe Day Date Desert Edition

Although vintage in appearance, the Day Date Desert Edition is undoubtedly modern in mechanism. Boasting a five-day power reserve and a 43mm satin-brushed steel case which is water-resistant to 30 bar, the latest Bathyscaphe model comes with all the essentials for a diver’s watch which are also useful for daily wear.

Read more: Nadezda Foundation’s Nadya Abela on running a children’s charity

The Bathyscaphe Mokarran Limited Edition timepiece (above) and researchers with a great hammerhead shark. Image by Thomas Pavy

In addition to the brand’s annual support to expeditions and major oceanographic projects as part of the ongoing Blancpain Ocean Commitment, Blancpain is now dedicating a diver’s watch to the protection of the Great Hammerhead shark. The conservation-themed Bathyscaphe Mokarran Limited Edition is limited to 50 pieces, with $1,000 of each sale donated to the Mokarran Protection Society, a non-profit organisation that is committed to researching great hammerhead populations in French Polynesia. Fitted with a display caseback, the tropical green Mokarran is engraved with a hammerhead on the rotor of its caliber 1318 movement.

Find out more: blancpain.com

The Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, located off the coast of California. Image by NOAA/Mark Norder

Douglas McCauley directs the Benioff Ocean Initiative, the philanthropic organisation created by billionaire Salesforce founder Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne. McCauley, a marine biologist, says that philanthropists can do much more to save the oceans than simply write a cheque

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Douglas McCauley. Image by Jonathan Little.

We all have an opportunity and responsibility to do something for ocean health, whatever walk of life we are from. The ocean has paid us some service – and this service can be reciprocated.

I grew up in Los Angeles and if you’ve passed through the Greater Los Angeles area you get a sense that there is a whole lot of concrete and man-made change on land. And then you hit the coast and you have this big, beautiful uninterrupted space. So, for me the first debt of gratitude that I have to the oceans is that they were my escape to a world where I could find wilderness and immerse myself in the beauty of the ocean. And there was the practical side: the ocean provided me with my dinner – it gave me employment and income.

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For most people, the debt that they owe the ocean is different. For some people, such as Marc and Lynne Benioff, their identity has been shaped by ocean places such as San Francisco and Hawaii where they’ve lived and raised kids. The ocean has given them a lot of inspiration and beauty and knowledge. To be in a place that is so ancient and to be part of the majesty of the ocean and to experience such a mindful reset, and then to jump back into life on land and manage it successfully, means that you as an individual have drawn some value from the solitude and exaltation felt when by the ocean.

In the arrangement that we forged, Marc and I are each trying to repay some portion of that debt. As an ocean scientist, I can use the tools, our networks and our laboratories to try to be helpful, and Marc uses his resources, his influence, his network, to help create change. These two worlds together are really powerful.

For many people, the oceans feel very remote from us, making it a harder environment as a philanthropic domain to connect with. But there are some very practical ways that the oceans, even if they are remote, do provide benefits to all of us. The most universal of these is that the ocean, as it lives and breathes, as it aspires and photosynthesizes, produces half of the oxygen on the planet.

That means that whether you’re in seaside Miami or in landlocked Geneva, every other breath that you take comes from the oceans. It is a life-support system and certainly enough reason for us to connect to make sure that it continues to be fully functioning and healthy. When you do actually recognise that you have a debt to repay to the oceans, it is important to return the favour to the sea, to repay that debt.

The numbers of people who have made that reconnection to the oceans and have become champions for the seas are relatively few in the world of philanthropy. Statistics estimate that approximately one per cent of philanthropy is dedicated to the oceans. There are so many important causes on the planet that deserve our attention and investment but for a living place that encompasses two-thirds of our planet and provides us with half of our breaths, perhaps it deserves more from us. Each individual’s philanthropic portfolio matters, because each one incrementally will help us move a little bit further north of that one per cent.

Building partnerships with scientists and science can be powerful and create some symbiotic opportunities. Almost all of us have a relationship with a university, and we might be surprised that there are centres and hubs of ocean excellence in many universities, and not just places on the coast. For example, ETH in Zurich, Switzerland is one such hub of excellence.

Read more: How ethical blue economy investments support ocean conservation

Unfortunately, the problems facing ocean health are so large that there has to be a critical mass. No one single university is going to be able to change things. So a lot of what we are trying to do is create a template by which we can activate our colleagues and peers to demonstrate that we can actually make a difference.

For example, when you’re looking at an issue such as plastic pollution, in which you have more than five trillion pieces of plastic in the global oceans, that is too big an issue for any one organisation to solve. So we are trying to create this model to facilitate change by creating open tools that will not only help and but also become replicable in other places.

That is one reason why working with Marc Benioff has been so successful. He is a problem solver who has built a globally successful company. There is much that we have learned from him about the general mechanics of problem solving, and about the many tools that cross that boundary, such as the ones we use in ocean problem solving that originally were designed for industry and technology.

When we started working with the Benioffs, I had the incorrect assumption that we would have a few starter conversations, they would send us a cheque, and we would be off on our own to try to figure this out. But the most valuable thing that they did for us was not send us the cheque. Instead, the most valuable thing that they did for us was to open up their networks and to share their expertise, and to very usefully help match us with people that could have a part of a solution that we needed.

Find out more: boi.ucsb.edu; labs.eemb.ucsb.edu/mccauley/doug/

This article originally appeared in the LUX x Deutsche Bank Wealth Management Blue Economy Special in the Autumn/Winter 2020/2021 Issue. 

The Lisbon Oceanarium, Europe’s largest informational and educational space on the oceans, is operated by a foundation launched by Portugal’s Dos Santos family. Image by Paulo Maxim

Claudio de Sanctis, the new Global Head of Wealth Management at Deutsche Bank, has been passionate about the oceans since he was young. He now sees the blue economy – the sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth – as a major and necessary target for investments. LUX speaks with him to discover why

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Claudio de Sanctis

LUX: How did your interest in ocean conservation arise?
Claudio de Sanctis: It’s something that goes back to my childhood. I was brought up in Italy and school summers there are very long. I spent a good portion of that time in the water snorkelling and skin diving in the Mediterranean and I developed an incredibly strong connection to the sea and the life in it. You carry forward that passion for animals and life in the sea; and then, if you are 47 as I am now and you are still spending your holidays diving in the sea with your family, you witness first-hand the changes that have gone on. You have this passion, you have witnessed this crisis, and there is a part of you that says something needs to be done.

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LUX: You have personally noticed the environmental changes in the sea?
Claudio de Sanctis: One hundred per cent. If you don’t dive or spend time underwater, the ocean may seem like a beautiful, big, blue expanse and it’s difficult to perceive how it’s changing; it looks as beautiful now as it did 50 years ago. But if you do actually spend time underwater, you then notice that the Mediterranean, for example, has changed dramatically. In the past 40 years, plastic has replaced fish. There were previously a lot of fish, and now there are far fewer and plastic is popping up more and more so it’s now almost impossible to get underwater without seeing a large amount. Also, tropical fish are being seen in Greece, for example, which is a concern as it suggests a very significant change in temperature. If you go to the tropics, the situation is very similar. I have less than 20 years’ experience diving in the tropics, but even in that time, the situation has deteriorated and reefs have disappeared.

LUX: And this is what inspired your focus on the blue economy, which includes ocean conservation and much more besides.
Claudio de Sanctis: That’s correct. There are two fundamental beliefs informing this. One is that institutions such as Deutsche Bank have a fantastic history, if you realise that, for example, we have invested in young artists for the past 40 years for no other reason than social responsibility. While we are a business for profit, doing things because they are relevant and important for the societies we operate in, and because it’s right to be doing them, is important. In that context, we try to do things that are relevant to our clients. I meet clients on a daily basis and more often than not, the discussion will turn to conservation and particularly ocean conservation, and the strongest message I get is one of interest and one of alarm. “How can I help?”, they ask. And that’s how the blue economy comes into play because I believe that the best way to protect the sea is actually to explain to everybody the extraordinary sustainable, long-term economic value it has. There is a lot we need to explain to the world, such as the fact that we breathe because of the ocean; if we damage the ocean beyond a certain point, we won’t be able to breathe air any more. This is very much where education comes into play. And if you understand how the ocean can produce long-term economic development for low-income, underdeveloped countries, that is very relevant. If it’s properly harnessed, the blue-economy potential for a country such as Indonesia is extraordinary. It can lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and give them long-term prospects.

LUX: Are there increasing investment opportunities for the blue economy?
Claudio de Sanctis: There are, but there is so much more to be done, which is why the conference we are holding is so interesting. At the moment it is a very thin market but you essentially have three main drivers. The first one is very wealthy families who set up dedicated foundations, which in turn invest long term in ocean conservation and the blue economy. In that space, education plays a massive role. Secondly, if you don’t want to have a dedicated foundation then you can invest in financial instruments. There are more and more liquid financial instruments starting with blue bonds that allow you to contribute capital with a certain degree of return in order to help these underlying themes. The last element that we need to develop is investing directly in companies as more start up with a blue economy angle.

LUX: Will the blue economy become more important within environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing in general?
Claudio de Sanctis: That’s a very good question. My view is that when it comes to ESG, there is no need to put different sub-themes within ESG into competition. There is so much need for more across the board. I can say that interest in ocean conservation and the blue economy is growing exponentially and the awareness of it is growing extraordinarily fast because it’s tied to very important problems. I mean, science has now led us to understand that the oxygen for two breaths in every three comes from the sea, which is something that, five to ten years ago, very few people knew. So if you pollute the sea to a point that that sort of oxygen production slows down, you have a huge problem, because we’re not going to be replanting a lot of forest in the next 50 years. And planting forest takes a long time. Most of the ESG themes are fundamentally interlinked. For example, ocean conservation, blue economy and climate change all interlock.

Read more: Fashion designer Kevin Germanier’s sustainable glamour

LUX: Do companies who may believe they are not responsible for, say, ocean degradation because they are based far from the sea, need to be made aware of this interlocking, that the ocean is relevant to them?
Claudio de Sanctis: That is a very fundamental point. Awareness is everything and in my view, the awareness we need to create is not so much in the companies as in the end consumer. Everybody needs to understand the relevance of this resource, that the ocean is deteriorating and what the consequences of this are. And then on the positive side, what are the opportunities we can extract from the sea if we actually manage it properly? When we talk of the problem of plastic in the oceans, everyone thinks of the poor albatross found with plastic in its stomach, which is a significant problem. It’s an easier problem to grasp than microplastics, which are less visible. But while plastic bottle and bag waste affects marine mammals and sea birds, it is microplastics that affect fish. And the biggest polluting factor in the plastic problem is our clothing. Every time we wash our clothes in a washing machine, particularly anything that has plastic fibres, we release microplastics into the ocean. This is just an example, and this is why we need education, because there is so much more that we need to know and that we need consumers to know because it is they who ultimately drive politicians and purchasing.

LUX: What would you like to achieve through your blue economy programme?
Claudio de Sanctis: In our business we talk to a number of very significant families about what it means to actually have positive impact. So even if we help a few of these families be more aware of the problems and solutions, that is already gratifying for me personally in terms of helping the cause. From a Deutsche Bank point of view, my aspiration is that in the next two to three years when Wealth Management clients think about oceans, they think about ocean conservation and economic development tied to that. And then they think of Deutsche Bank and pick up the phone and speak to their banker here.

Find out more: deutschewealth.com

This article originally appeared in the LUX x Deutsche Bank Wealth Management Blue Economy Special in the Summer 2020 Issue.

Mahi photographed by Annie Guttridge

A new generation of photographer-activists are raising awareness of the beauty under the sea, and creating a call to action to save the oceans

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ANNIE GUTTRIDGE
Photographer, ocean advocate, president of non-profit Saving the Blue

“All my photography is taken while free-diving. I love the peace of taking a single breath and descending towards the ocean floor. It’s a quiet, serene experience, which allows both the diver and animal a calm exchange. My life revolves around the ocean, and I have seen the damage. We can all aid in recovery. My best advice? Start something – many wish to see the world change for the better, but words are easy. Action is where the magic happens.”

Find out more: annieguttridge.com
Follow Annie on Instagram: @annieguttridge

‘Flirting’ by Annie Guttridge

FILIPPO BORGHI
Award-winning photographer and conservationist

“I started photographing underwater 15 years ago. Unfortunately, in recent years, climate change and the increase in pollution have drastically changed most of the seabed. The biggest and most important challenge is raising awareness of the effect of intensive fishing and plastic. This has a terrible effect on marine animals and the marine parks that are the last havens where nature manages to regenerate itself. I hope that my photographs will arouse a desire to protect this unique and important environment.”

Follow Filippo on Instagram: @filippoborghi5

Filippo Borghi photographed by Mario Odorisio

This article originally appeared in the LUX x Deutsche Bank Wealth Management Blue Economy Special in the Summer 2020 Issue.

The Silent Evolution (2009) by Jason deCaires Taylor, at Cancún Marine Park, Mexico.

Artist, diver and marine conservationist Jason deCaires Taylor creates mesmerising underwater art that draws divers away from delicate coral ecosystems and helps scientists study the effects of pollution. He speaks to LUX about his new project near the Great Barrier Reef

Jason deCaires Taylor

LUX: How do you ensure the materials you use don’t cause harm to the environment?
Jason deCaires Taylor: I’ve been researching materials now for around 14 years with artificial reef companies and universities and marine biologists to find the best metal for the job that doesn’t degrade and that is pH neutral, doesn’t leach any toxins into the environment and encourages marine life to grow.

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LUX: How does your work contribute to the ocean environment?
Jason deCaires Taylor: On a basic level my sculptures become artificial reefs designed to encourage marine life and create a habitat. We also use the sculptures to control tourism, as a way of drawing tourists away from fragile coral reefs so their impact can be minimised. Part of the process is changing the laws about how the sea is used in that area and to create marine protected areas. Also, most of the pieces have an environmental message behind them about themes such as global warming or ocean pollution.

LUX: How did you progress from being a diver to being a sculptor, marine conservationist and photographer?
Jason deCaires Taylor: It was a kind of a slow evolution. I studied to be a sculptor first. After that, I wanted to explore the world a little bit and so I became a diving instructor. I then decided that it would be ideal if I could try to combine my two interests and it just kind of evolved from there.

LUX: Your Molinere Bay Underwater Sculpture Park in Grenada has been listed as one of National Geographic’s top 25 wonders of the world. How did this come about?
Jason deCaires Taylor: That was my first project. I was living in Grenada teaching and diving and a hurricane that passed through decimated one of the bays and damaged all the coral. There was only one bay left pristine and so all the tourists were heading there and having a big impact on it. So, we needed to draw people away and that’s when I started producing artworks. I didn’t have a firm plan for it, I just thought I’d experiment for a year and see what happens. It became extremely popular and led on to bigger works.

Read more: How Gaggenau is innovating the ancient art of steam cooking

LUX: Tell me about the work you do with conservation organisations.
Jason deCaires Taylor: I have worked with the World Wide Fund for Nature and with Greenpeace on campaigns about ocean plastics and other issues. I have found the fact that the sculptures are dramatic and unusual means they’re good at generating publicity, so I’m able to smuggle in other stories as it’s not so easy to talk about some of these things.

LUX: You’ve started working with Gaggenau?
Jason deCaires Taylor: It’s quite a new relationship. They have a strong connection to the arts and often support artists. They contacted me a few months ago about working together and that was how the exhibition of work by myself and others alongside their designs came about.

The Coral Greenhouse (2020), Great Barrier Reef, Australia

LUX: You have a major ongoing project in the Great Barrier Reef. Can you tell us anything about that?
Jason deCaires Taylor: We have completed the first two stages, one of which is a piece called Ocean Siren. This work actually changes colour according to what the temperature of the reef is. It’s positioned just off the coast of Queensland, above water this time, standing on the water. It’s linked to a weather station on the reef and the figure, which is based on a local indigenous girl, changes colour as the reef changes and as the risk of coral bleaching becomes higher. The idea is that she issues a warning to an urban environment or to a coastal community about what’s happening to the reef. The other stage is a large underwater building called The Coral Greenhouse. We’ve been working with a group of marine biologists at probably one of the biggest marine science universities in the world, at James Cook University in Queensland, and also with the Australian Institute of Marine Science. We’re using this new building as a kind of underwater laboratory/art installation and we’re going to be planting thousands of different types of coral in this greenhouse and installing monitoring devices to see what the dissolved oxygen count is, to help keep tabs on what’s happening on the Great Barrier Reef.

LUX: It sounds like you do a lot of scientific research into these projects yourself. Do you have a scientific background or do you learn with each project?
Jason deCaires Taylor: I haven’t got any science education behind me. I’ve worked in so many places around the world and it’s impossible to be an expert in all of these different sites, so I work closely with local biologists. I also trained as an underwater naturalist when I was doing my diving course. I think I’ve learned what I do know by being underwater for so much of my life.

View Jason deCaires Taylor’s portfolio: underwatersculpture.com

Interview by Emma Marnell

This article was originally published in the Summer 2020 Issue, out now.