Kristal Ambrose
Founder and Director, Bahamas Plastic Movement; Ph.D. Candidate, World Maritime University (WMU), Sweden
Kristal Ambrose, or Kristal Ocean, is an environmental scientist studying marine debris and plastic pollution in The Bahamas. After sailing across the Pacific to study the Western Garbage Patch, she was inspired to return to The Bahamas to spark a plastic pollution revolution. Her environmental career spans over a decade, including as Founder and Director of Bahamas Plastic Movement, a non-profit raising awareness of and developing solutions to plastic pollution. She is now based at the World Maritime University as a Ph.D. candidate in marine debris monitoring in the Wider Caribbean Region.
Ambrose has raised the global profile of plastic pollution and was instrumental in The Bahamas’ 2020 single-use plastic ban, for which she won the Goldman Environment Prize for Islands and Island Nations. She has featured in a number of magazines, was named an Ocean Hero by musician Jack Johnson and received the 2014 Environmental Youth Leader Award from the Government of The Bahamas.
In 2022, she published her children’s book “Kai and Gaia Discover the Gyre”, about a young Bahamian girl named Kai (Ocean) who is inspired to end ocean plastic pollution after her best friend, a turtle named Gaia (Earth), becomes stuck at sea in a trash gyre.
SPEAKERS & MODERATORS
Zaidy Afrin
UN Fellow of Government of Grenada´s Blue Innovation Institute & Ph.D. Candidate at World Maritime University (WMU), Sweden
Vera Agostini
Deputy Director, Fisheries and Aquaculture Policy and Resources Division, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Italy
Kristal Ambrose
Founder and Director, Bahamas Plastic Movement; Ph.D. Candidate, World Maritime University (WMU), Sweden
Steven Bograd
Supervisory Research Oceanographer, NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center, Institute of Marine Sciences (UCSC), USA
Jens Brandenburg
Parliamentary State Secretary, Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Germany
Isabella Lövin
Chair, Stockholm Environment Institute & Co-chair, Friends of Ocean Action & Author, Sweden
Carolyn Lundquist
Associate Professor at University of Auckland, National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), New Zealand
Flower E. Msuya
Senior Researcher, Founder & Chairperson, Zanzibar Seaweed Cluster Initiative, Tanzania
Christian Müller
Head of marine resource exploration, German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR), Germany
Alexis Papathanassis
Professor for Cruise Tourism Management, the Bremerhaven University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Angelique Pouponneau
Policy Adviser to the Chair of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), Seychelles
Vladimir Ryabinin
Executive Secretary, the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO, France
Jörn Schmidt
Chair of Science Committee, International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), Denmark
Merete Tandstad
EAF-Nansen Programme Coordinator, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Italy