Our Ocean Panama Youth Leadership Summit: Meet Paula

Sustainable Ocean Alliance is proud to co-organize the Our Ocean Youth Leadership Summit (OOYLS) in Panama this coming February. We are helping to bring together an incredible group of youth from around the world to tackle the greatest challenges facing the ocean. In this series leading up to the conference, you will get to learn a bit about some of the participants! Check out SOA's blog for updates.

Meet Paula (Pau) Sills, 27, of Panama

Pau Sills, 27, is from Panama – so she is intimately familiar with the beautiful ecosystems participants will be surrounded by at the Our Ocean Youth Leadership Summit. Her focus area at the summit will be the sustainable blue economy.

She is already contributing to the local blue economy. Pau is the founder of Ankay Conservation, where she teaches scuba divers how the Bocas Del Toro ecosystem works, about the marine species present, and how we can protect them through scientific conservation efforts.

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Through this eco-tourism lens, Pau works to create awareness and inspire a passion for conservation. She also uses the diving program as an eco-monitoring tool to provide a broad understanding of the regional health and abundance of the coral reef ecosystem, as well as create data sets for dive sites across different depths and species. Her goal is to generate meaningful data to contribute to policy decisions regarding the conservation of local reefs. Pau hopes to serve as an example of the importance of properly managing Marine Protected Areas and developing business models around the concept of blue economies.

As part of the program, students are taught how to identify corals, measure their health, and the methodology for data collection underwater. They also offer introductory courses that can be completed in a couple of days on topics such as marine ecosystems or marine species. Each one is tailored to raise awareness of the threats to our ocean, and to give students the tools to be part of the conservation efforts. 

With the Summit drawing closer day by day, Pau tells us that she has much to look forward to. "I’m so excited to attend the OOYLS because I believe through the collective experiences of representatives around the world we can design and propose the best solutions for the areas of action we wish to impact."

You can learn more about Pau's work by following Ankay Conservation on Instagram.