Ocean Climate Action
The Climate Crisis and the Ocean
The U.S. controls a vast underwater world roughly 1.5 times larger than the nation’s land area, which supports the daily lives of all Americans. From estuaries to deep canyons and seamounts, the ocean and our coastal ecosystems are critical to our survival.
The ocean drives weather and climate patterns, provides half the oxygen we breathe, and is a source of food, spiritual and cultural nourishment, recreation, renewable energy, and promising scientific discovery. The ocean contributes hundreds of billions of dollars in goods and services to the country’s gross domestic product and employs millions of people.
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our ocean is in crisis.
The ocean struggles from decades of overexploitation, plastic pollution and habitat destruction. Now climate change is fundamentally altering ocean ecosystems and creating a ‘triple threat’:
1. The ocean is absorbing over 90% of the excess heat produced by rising greenhouse gasses and has done so unabated since 1970.
2. The ocean has absorbed nearly a third of the carbon dioxide from greenhouse gas emissions since the 1980’s, which has led to and exacerbated the acidification of our ocean.
3. The warmer the ocean is, the less oxygen it can hold. The decline in oxygen can cause changes in biodiversity, productivity, and nutrient cycling.
These changes are limiting nature’s ability to buffer increasing climate impacts — impacts felt by communities in the form of disasters like storms, fires, and floods. We know that nature is important and needs to be protected to mitigate the crises of climate change and biodiversity loss.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Global Sixth Assessment released in Spring 2022, underscores the importance of transformative change.
The ocean can help. It is a powerful source of solutions that have the potential to provide a fifth of the greenhouse gas emission reductions needed globally to limit temperature rise to 1.5°C. However, even if warming is limited to 1.5 degrees celsius, the ocean will continue to see impacts of this warming until at least 2300.
Which means there is literally no time left to waste.
Congress and the Biden Administration must treat the ocean as the climate champion it is and step up to meet U.S. and global climate goals.
Congress and the Administration must implement a comprehensive approach to ocean climate action to leverage the power of the ocean in the fight against climate change. We need to protect vulnerable ocean ecosystems and adapt coastal communities to the impacts of climate change that are already locked in while prioritizing economic, racial, climate, and environmental justice.
In June 2022, the Healthy Ocean Coalition assisted in the collaboratively-developed Blueprint for Ocean Climate Action, a suite of policy recommendations on 12 key issue areas for ocean climate action from over 100 organizations and groups. This Plan should be the basis for developing the Administration’s Ocean Climate Action Plan.
Ocean climate action involves three areas of action:
The Healthy Ocean Coalition is focused on calling on the Biden Administration to:
Develop a bold, transformative Ocean Climate Action Plan by the White House Ocean Policy Committee by the end of 2022.
Prioritize development of highly and fully protected marine protected areas (MPAs) within the America the Beautiful Initiative.
Center equity and participation by vulnerable communities in decision-making at all scales to build trust, and deepen and widen support for transformative change.