Participants streaming in from early morning to reach the lecture halls

This was another of the annual mammoth events organised by the European Geosciences Union, convened again for their general assembly from 3 to 8 May 2026 in Vienna, Austria.

The amazing drill and organisational capacity kept the flow of  almost 22,500 registered participants going, of which 20,000 actually attended in person in Vienna. On-site participants came from 125 countries. 2,470 joined online from 107 countries. An almost unbelievable more than 20,000 presentations were given in 1,014 sessions. Of these, 58% of the abstracts were identified as contributions from Early Career Scientists (ECS).

It’s a bit of a tradition that Mundus maris contributes to the EOS stream on education and outreach sessions. This year Cornelia E Nauen presented a poster titled ‘Scale matters, but sometimes in unexpected ways’. The key point put forward is that the dogma of efficiency that became dominant after World War II is driving resource use to the extreme, producing the ‘hockey stick’ curves of exploiation that led to the anthropocene. At latest count, 7 our of 9 planetary boundaries have been breached and thus putting humanity in harm’s way. As it were, some form of ‘monoculture’ looks like the most efficient approach to production and consumption, though we know that even minor changes of whatever origin will throw the system out of kilter and spells its demise. Thus, honing a balance between scaling for efficiency and fostering diversity and redundancy in any system, thus sacrificing some efficiency, is the principle making systems adaptable and successful in copying with change. To do this, the abstract argues that phasing out unselective and particularly destructive forms of marine food harvesting and giving more room again for locally adapted, low impact, small-scale fisheries would climate proof marine food harvesting and lead to greater justice in resource allocation and benefit sharing

Needless to say, one has to navigate carefully through the programme ahead of time to pick out the most interesting sessions and make many tough decisions where to go. But it’s always a good opportunity to discuss with peers and get new insights. So, let’s see whether it’ll be EGU27 once more.