Somewhere off the coast of Mexico, a vessel moves slowly through open water. It’s not fishing. It’s not surveying. It’s hunting seaweed. Why? To take carbon out of the atmosphere, while buying fragile coastlines a little more time. That vessel is the latest chapter in a story that started 25 years ago, underwater.
A career shaped by a hurricane
Pablo Besquin began as a construction diver in the Caribbean. Born in Mexico City to Polish parents, he later moved to Canada, and eventually found his way back to Mexico, diving in Cancún. There wasn’t a grand plan. “One thing led to another,” he says. A hurricane hit the coastline where he was living. The beach began to disappear. Hotels that had once been buffered by wide stretches of sand were suddenly exposed. The ocean was moving in.
That moment changed the course of his life. Today, Pablo is the founder and CEO of Oceanus International, working from the Netherlands with a global, decentralized network of coastal engineers, scientists, and academic partners, from Delft to South Florida. Together, they design solutions for one of the most urgent questions of our time: how do we live with rising seas?
“I really respect the ocean,” Pablo says. “I work for the ocean.”
Building with nature, not against it
Across the Caribbean and beyond, coastlines are vanishing. Rising sea levels, stronger storms, and decades of poor planning are accelerating erosion. Entire economies built on tourism and beachfront property are at risk.
Pablo doesn’t believe in fighting nature with brute force. Instead, he designs what he calls hybrid solutions: engineered structures that make space for natural systems to recover and take over.
A typical approach might look like this:
- Artificial reefs or breakwaters reduce wave energy.
- Those calmer conditions make it possible for mangroves and other coastal vegetation to establish.
- Once established, the living system stabilizes sediment, strengthens biodiversity, and improves long-term resilience.
“It’s about using red, green, and blue,” he explains: the social, the ecological, and the ocean, working together.
A key principle: there is no one-size-fits-all coastline. Wave patterns, depth, sediment transport, and ecosystems vary dramatically; even a few kilometers apart. “I found a lot of charlatans early on,” Pablo says. “People who claimed their technology could fix everything. But every place has its own rhythm. You have to tailor it.”
The slow work behind coastal solutions
Designing with nature is not fast. A single project can take years before the first structure is placed in the water. Often because of complex environmental impact assessments and permitting. But when it works, the results are tangible. “You see kids playing on the beach again,” Pablo says. “You go snorkeling and there are fish again. It’s a whole difference.”
Then came the seaweed
Around 2015, a new problem began washing ashore: sargassum. Massive blooms of this floating seaweed started appearing across the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. When it piles up on beaches, it rots: damaging ecosystems, harming tourism, and creating serious local health and cleanup challenges. “The blooms are the size of continents,” Pablo says. “They can stretch from Africa to the Americas. The scale is enormous.”
Pablo’s clients started calling: could he solve this too? So he began studying and modeling the problem. What he found reframed it. Roughly 95% of sargassum never reaches land. It naturally sinks to the ocean floor at the end of its life, taking the carbon it absorbed while growing with it. Only around 5% makes it to coastlines. The question became: what if you could intercept that 5% before it hits shore, and help it sink safely, intentionally, and verifiably?
Golden Tides: turning a coastal crisis into carbon sequestration
That insight led to Golden Tides, a collaboration with Climate Cleanup. The concept is straightforward in principle, complex in execution:
- Offshore vessels identify and collect sargassum before it reaches the coast.
- The system aims to accelerate a natural sinking pathway, turning the biomass into a form of carbon sequestration.
- Nearshore catch systems collect what escapes, diverting it for processing, potentially into bioplastics or energy.
Nothing is wasted.
The first large-scale operations are expected to go live soon in Mexico and the United States.
A fight worth joining
Pablo doesn’t romanticize the bigger picture. “It’s like death by a thousand cuts,” he says. “Pollution, heat, poor management: everything adds up. Sometimes it feels overwhelming.”
And yet, he keeps going, because the impact isn’t abstract. It’s visible in restored beaches, recovering ecosystems, and communities that can stay where they are. What gives him hope is connection: the moments when people working on different pieces of the climate puzzle realize they’re part of the same effort. “You feel you’re not alone,” he says.
Progress, he believes, is happening, though slowly. Regulations are improving. Awareness is growing. More developers are asking for nature-inclusive designs. But it’s not enough. “We need more people,” he says. “More people who are committed for the long run. Align your values, and don’t break them.” Because in the end, that’s what it comes down to. “When you look in the mirror, you want to know you stood up for what matters.”
Twenty-five years of working with the sea taught Pablo Besquin one thing above all: the ocean is patient. We have to be too.