The Carlo Heip International Award for outstanding accomplishments in marine biodiversity science was inaugurated in 2018, in recognition of Carlo Heip’s leadership in marine biodiversity research and founding of the ‘World Conference on Marine Biodiversity’ (WCMB). The Award is granted in a three-year cycle by the International Association for Biological Oceanography (IABO), to someone who has demonstrated exemplary leadership in marine biodiversity science.

For this cycle (2023-2025), the Carlo Heip Award is presented to Professor Emeritus Philippe Bouchet, of the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle (MNHN) in Paris, France. Following tradition, the Award will be officially handed over by the IABO’s Recognition Committee during the 7th World Conference on Marine Biodiversity (WCMB 2026) in Bruges, Belgium. During the Conference, Philippe will not only receive this Award, he will also address all Conference participants as a keynote speaker, on a topic of his choice.

Carlo Heip (1945 – 2013) was an eminent scientist and a committed intellectual who as a researcher contributed to the better preservation of the marine environment. He was a source of inspiration for many national and international initiatives in the field of marine research. He played an important part in promoting European research into land-ocean interaction, and into ecological processes in estuaries, in particular. He was responsible for numerous EU projects. The most important of these EU projects was MARBEF (Marine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning), in which taxonomists and ecologists worked together on a European scale to strengthen our understanding of marine biodiversity and ecosystem function and support the protection of marine biodiversity. This project made a significant contribution to worldwide initiatives to better describe and understand the importance and variety of organisms in the sea.