Cornelia E Nauen heads the international non-profit association Mundus maris – Sciences and Arts for Sustainability and chairs the Board of Trustees of Quantitative Aquatics hosting global biodiversity information systems. She was a tenured official in the European Commission DG RTD. Martin Bohle is a retired EU official, an academic scholar initially researching dynamics of lakes and seas. He worked as manager at the Directorate General for Research and Innovation (DG RTD) of the European Commission. Since a decade he is publishing regularly on the relationships between science and society, as perceived from an Earth Sciences baseline.