APRIL 28TH – 30TH | HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA

2026 Annual Convening

We are excited to bring our 2026 Annual Convening to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Canada is a fast-growing hub for ocean-climate research, and we’re looking forward to bringing together both local and global partners to create new opportunities for knowledge-sharing and collaboration.

Please mark your calendars for April 28 – 30 and bookmark this page for future updates. We will post more information here as it becomes available.

For any event-related questions, please reach out to info@carbontosea.org.

General Event Information

The conference will take place at the The Westin, Nova Scotian at 1181 Hollis St. in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

 

Registration will take place on the second floor of the Westin Nova Scotian on Tuesday, April 28th from 3:00 PM – 6:00 PM and on Wednesday, April 29th from 7:30 AM – 2:30 PM.

Please be advised that photographs and/or video footage may be taken at the event for use by Carbon to Sea Initiative publicly on our website, social media, and in the press.

THE WESTIN NOVA SCOTIAN

1181 Hollis St. in Halifax, NS, Canada

Agenda

The 2026 Annual Convening will take place at the Westin Nova Scotian in Halifax from April 28 through April 30.

This year’s core agenda includes a welcome reception for all attendees on Tuesday, April 28 at 6:00 PM, followed by core programming all day Wednesday and Thursday. Core programming will conclude with a closing reception on Thursday evening. Please find a detailed tentative agenda, below.

Additional optional, space-limited site visits will be held during the day on April 28.

  • 9:00 AM – 3:30 PM – Optional, space-limited site visits to Dalhousie University’s OAE and ocean-climate labs, and Planetary’s OAE operations at Nova Scotia Power
  • 3:00 PM – 6:00 PM – Registration at second floor of Westin Nova Scotian
  • 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM – Welcome Reception
    • Halifax Train Station, 1161 Hollis St.
  • 7:30 AM – 8:30 AM – Registration Continues and Breakfast
  • 8:30 AM – 9:00 AM – Welcome and Land Acknowledgment
  • 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM – OAE Frontier Research, Knowledge Gaps & Field Tools
    • This session will highlight high-priority updates of OAE research related to its efficacy, environmental impacts and field research developments. Scheduled coffee breaks will occur during this session.
  • 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM – Lunch
  • 2:00 PM – 2:20 PM – Keynote Address
  • 2:20 PM – 5:00 PM – Governing oCDR: National Signals and International Frameworks
    • This session will examine the policy environment at multiple levels shaping research. Practitioners will share policy case studies and provide an expert deep dive into the international governance frameworks for mCDR, highlighting developments across LC/LP, UNFCCC, and BBNJ. Scheduled coffee breaks will occur during this session.
  • 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM – Poster Session Reception
    • Refreshments & heavy hors d’oeuvres will be served.
  • 8:00 AM – 9:00 AM – Breakfast
  • 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM – Exploring Markets and OAE’s Place
    • This session will provide an overview of the state of “the market” for OAE and explore diverse perspectives on the private sector’s role and commercial activity in carrying out OAE research.
  • 10:30 AM – 11:00 AM – Coffee Break
  • 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM – Concurrent Workshops: Session A
    • Indigenous Science Partnerships
      • Organized by Ken Paul (Pokiok Associates) and Brooke Moore (Pokiok Associates)
      • Indigenous Peoples have long led rigorous, place-based scientific inquiry grounded in observation, stewardship, and intergenerational knowledge transfer. Across Canada, Indigenous-led research initiatives are advancing environmental monitoring, fisheries science, coastal stewardship, and climate adaptation—often in parallel with, and complementary to, academic and industrial R&D.
        Despite growing recognition of Indigenous Knowledge systems, there remain few venues that meaningfully platform Indigenous-led science as science, center Indigenous researchers as equal partners, and create space for reciprocal collaboration with international academic and private-sector scientists.
        This workshop is designed to foreground Indigenous-led scientific projects in Canada, highlight “two-eyed seeing” approaches that integrate Indigenous and Western scientific methodologies, and catalyze new relationships rooted in respect, reciprocity, and shared research goals.
    • Perspectives on measurement requirements for MRV: from individual project to global impact
      • Organized by Dr. Dariia Atamanchuk (Dalhousie University), Dr. Ellen Briggs (University of California, San Diego), Dr. Kohen Bauer (Carbon to Sea Initiative), Dr. Robert Izett (Planetary), Jessica Oberlander (Pro-Oceanus Systems), Dr. Ellen Park (Dalhousie University), and Dr. Adam Subhas (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)
      • This MRV level-setting workshop seeks to report on and share progress in measurement-informed MRV development to date, and to set future targets. Through sharing perspectives from individual project standpoints to global-scale impact, we aim to better inform the OAE community and stakeholders, and spotlight areas requiring further research, technological advances, and improvements in metrology.
        Ultimately, it seeks to align present and future observing efforts by mapping a community-defined and supported “priority vector” that captures where and why measurement needs converge or diverge across applications (research vs operations), purposes (compliance, quantification, monitoring, process understanding), and scales (project to global.
    • Learnings from Coastal Integrations for Open-Ocean Climate Solutions
      • Organized by Dr. Gabriella Kitch (Carbon Removal Standards Initiative), Anu Khan (Carbon Removal Standards Initiative), Toby Bryce (Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture), and Beck Woollen, (Carbon Removal Standards Initiative)
      • OAE could enable durable carbon removal at scale, but near-term progress is constrained by limited field data and uncertainty around environmental impacts, permitting, and social license.
        To address these challenges, many OAE field pilots are integrated into existing coastal and industrial systems, such as desalination, wastewater treatment, and coastal restoration to leverage their existing infrastructure, expertise, and regulatory pathways. However, the field lacks a clear framework for assessing how insights from these integrations translate to large-scale implementation.
        This workshop will convene industry practitioners, researchers, and civil society representatives to evaluate the role of sectoral integrations in scaling OAE and to identify which learnings are broadly transferable versus context-specific.
  • 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM – Lunch
  • 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM – Concurrent Workshops: Session B
    • A Path to Success: Expert Input on R&D Roadmapping
      • Organized by Dr. David Keller (Carbon to Sea Initiative) and Laura Stieghorst (Carbon to Sea Initiative)
      • Key to OAE’s success as a climate solution is a shared vision for how to achieve science-informed policy decisions in the next decade and a research roadmap that lays out activities and key decision points along the way. This level of coordination requires regularly revisiting the industry’s accomplishments and remaining gaps in scientific knowledge, and reaffirming priorities and checkpoints.
        As the largest forum for OAE experts, the annual convening provides the platform to gather valuable data points for our roadmap, and to open a dialogue on OAE pathway-specific priorities, uncertainties, and vulnerabilities. This session will use an OAE pathway specific scenario-based approach to gather critical information for an R&D roadmap that will be externally shared later in the year.
    • Learning from Experience: Takeaways from Early Community and Policy Engagement in mCDR
      • Organized by: Dr. Celina Scott-Buechler (Duke University)
      • Responsible mCDR field research requires meaningful engagement between multiple actors at multiple scales. Researchers, technology developers, Indigenous Peoples, communities, and policymakers now have several years of experience experimenting with different how to engage on mCDR. But what have we learned? How can successes be replicated and missteps avoided?
        This workshop invites anyone involved in these early experiences of engagement – personally, organizationally, or through observations of the broader field – to share what they’ve learned and learn from others. We aim to move beyond high-level guidance to develop actionable, experience-based practices and guardrails for mCDR engagement and collaboration. Participants will have access to an early report-out from the session along with opportunities to continue learning across the field.
    • Assessing Environmental Risk of mCDR Projects with FEMM
      • Organized by Dr. Grace Andrews (Hourglass Climate) and Kristi Weighman (Hourglass Climate)
      • As marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) projects move from field trials toward commercial scale, it is critical to rigorously, consistently and quantitatively evaluate their environmental safety in the ocean. This hands-on workshop introduces the Framework for Ecotoxicological Modeling of mCDR (FEMM v1.0), a structured approach for mCDR environmental risk assessment, alongside FEMMtool, Hourglass Climate’s web application for implementing the framework. FEMM adapts established ecotoxicology practices to unique mCDR challenges, including those for OAE.
        Designed for practitioners, regulators, standard setters and others with an interest in project risk evaluation, this workshop provides a practical toolkit for quantifying and interpreting environmental risks by providing an overview of FEMM’s key components, how they connect to form a complete ecotoxicological risk assessment pathway, and how to implement FEMM and assess risk for projects via a hands-on tutorial of FEMMtool.
  • 3:30 PM – 4:00 PM – Coffee Break
  • 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM – Closing Remarks
  • 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM – Closing Reception
    • Refreshments & heavy hors d’oeuvres will be served.

Watch the 2025 Annual Convening Highlights Video