Reef-World holds 14+ years of environmental impact data collected from Green Fins assessments. This data was trapped in silos and needed human effort to manually export and transform CSV files into something meaningful. Impact data is used by the team to understand how environmental threats have evolved over time by location and industry. With the introduction of Green Fins digital membership, we needed a way to ground truth self-evaluation data and understand if Green Fins Hub engagement was having the intended behaviour centred design (BCD) impact....

Jumping on the bandwagon, I asked ChatGPT (Jan 9 Version) to draft a post for this blog and answer a series of follow up questions in the same thread. Here are my thoughts: Training and running a model like ChatGPT requires significant computational resources. I would like to see developers publishing precise energy consumption and carbon footprint figures and considering environmental impact as a key measure of their machine learning model’s performance (alongside accuracy, precision, recall, etc)....

Somewhat late to the party, jamesgreenblue.com is now a static website built using Hugo. Statically generated websites consume less energy as all pages and assets are pre-built – the promise of halving the carbon cost of my blog was a powerful motivator. According to one website carbon calculator, now only 0.01 g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits a page. It’s also lovely to have faster load times, improved security and not have to think about Wordpress updates 😅...

Writing the first post for a new blog is, to me, a lot like starting a fresh notebook, or buying a new piece of diving equipment. There is trepidation about getting started mixed with excitement about what will come from it. At some point you have to stop worrying about it and just start somewhere. So lets go! (This is my third attempt, so to give myself a head start I have collated a few posts written for other sites....

The Reef-World team was recently asked to summarise why we care about coral reefs to support ICRI ’s recommendation that coral reefs must be prioritised in the Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). Here is my answer: “Visiting coral reefs is to visit life: to see the building blocks of the ocean. As a freediver, I love the diversity of colours and structures of coral reefs – a sanctuary for abundant and unique marine life – but also because corals exist in a place free from distractions that we can only visit fleetingly and in the moment....

This post originally appeared on The Reef-World Foundation website. From my very first day at Reef-World, I have wanted to present the Green Fins dive and snorkel centre members on an interactive map. A technical challenge but one that would be hugely beneficial to our members as well as eco-minded tourists. If you’ve been on the Green Fins website recently, you may have spotted this is one of many exciting updates we have been able to make....

This post originally appeared on The Reef-World Foundation website. On the last day of June 2019, I made the decision to swap Bristol for South East Asia. I’d realised that, if I truly wanted to make a meaningful contribution to marine conservation, leaving my job would give me the dedicated time and headspace I needed to find a new challenge. Fast forward a year and I now work from Reef-World’s Philippines field office on Digital Strategy and supporting Green Fins implementation around the world – a dream come true!...