The ocean is a source of life and resilience – for people and cultures, for livelihoods, for climate stability. But it’s under growing stress: overfishing, warming, pollution, acidification, deoxygenation, extreme climate events – all happening at once, and often interacting. The ocean is hurtling towards catastrophic shifts with increasingly unpredictable and sudden effects.
As ocean scientists, we’ve documented these changes in detail, and have been sounding the alarm for decades – but meaningful political action is still lagging.
To help close the gap between what humanity must do and what we are doing, we need to rethink our role as scientists – not only to contribute knowledge and ideas, but as active participants in change. This will require structural changes in how we work, how we’re funded and trained, and how we measure success.
We must go beyond informing policy and actively help shape the responses to the complex problems facing the ocean.
Ocean scientists should build stronger alliances with civil society, government and Indigenous and local communities – engaging more and earlier. By broadening collaborations with more actors, we can contribute to more effective, equitable solutions.
We’ve seen many strong examples of this kind of work. In Belize, ocean scientists worked with fishers, tour guides and government to build a coral restoration project with some of the strongest long-term survival rates documented in the region. The OceanCanada Partnership connected Indigenous communities, NGOs, policymakers and scientists, expanding knowledge, with more than 200 publications, and contributing to national ocean and economic strategies.
Across Europe, researchers and government authorities have mobilized citizen scientists to monitor dangerous algae blooms, improving the public health response and arming citizens with knowledge and tools to take on threats to ocean health. In Australia’s vast Mayala Marine Park, scientists, local government and Indigenous communities worked together on a plan protecting biodiversity and cultural heritage while managing commercial and recreational land use.
These collaborations take extra work and funding. But experience shows that it’s worth it, for both research quality and practical impact.
These projects show the value of early engagement with policymakers and government. We can do our jobs and produce rigorous research and publish papers, but the stakes are too high to stop there.
Science must remain independent, to be free to critique policy and governance – but we can maintain our integrity while also communicating about and designing our work in ways that are more likely to get policymakers to listen and act, and involving them and other relevant actors in thoughtful ways.
Part of that starts with changing how we think about engagement: instead of abstract “government” or “policymakers”, we should be specific about whose attention we want to grab. What motivates them, and how can they be involved? Even short-term engagement can shape policy and funding.
At the same time, we’ve seen many benefits of broader community engagement. Pulling back the curtain and bringing people into the process strengthens trust in science – which is particularly important as we face persistent climate and environmental misinformation. Encouraging citizens to take part in and inform science relevant to them can sharpen our research, and make policies which flow from it more effective and equitable. This sense of shared ownership encourages people to stay involved and to push for more action.
In Norway, invasive sea urchins are tearing through kelp forests, part of vital marine ecosystems. Many people have been enthusiastic about a simple idea: dive in and smash them with hammers. With Norway’s tens of thousands of kilometres of winding coastline, is it a perfect solution? Like most problems, this one can’t be solved with just a hammer – but there’s another lesson, about balancing what science and technology can do, and what engages people emotionally.
Part of the challenge we confront is the ocean’s vastness, and the scale of the threats it faces. We need to make the science personal, and connect people to the problems and solutions and show that although these systems are complex, they are not limitless.
We can start by explaining the ocean’s significance not just in environmental terms, but also for individual lives, jobs, health and food security. We have many scientific tools we can use more strategically: interdisciplinary collaboration with climate sociologists, behavioural scientists and educators can help to understand opinions and narratives which motivate action (or inaction), and how we can communicate more effectively.
This is a lot – and it’s important that we don’t place the full responsibility on individual scientists. Many are just trying to survive in the system, and we find ourselves now in an exceptionally challenging moment for science.
We can start to improve this by looking at how we define and recognize impact. What if we evaluated work not just by papers published, but also in terms of decision-makers or communities engaged? Changing the metrics of success could expand the kind of research we choose (and can afford) to prioritize.
We also need to think about how funding is allocated, and emphasize interdisciplinary collaboration that allows us to bring in more perspectives and experience, instead of expecting each scientist to balance more and more tasks demanding diverse skills.
And of course, governments and institutions need to provide more support, money and backing, to help make this deeper engagement possible.
We’re going through a remarkable period of intersecting environmental, social and geopolitical crises. Ocean science can be part of the solution, not only to the daunting environmental challenges we face, but also by fostering collaboration which can contribute to understanding, global solidarity and diplomacy.
As science and its supporting infrastructure are increasingly sidelined, defunded or politicized, it’s vital to defend our role at the heart of just, inclusive and forward-looking governance.
Much is being asked of ocean scientists, as the field engages with urgent social and environmental issues. Sometimes, it can feel like our warnings go unheard. But we can’t stop trying. The future of the ocean and of the societies it sustains depends on it.
This article was originally published by SciDev.Net on 13 June 2025. Read the original publication here.
Picture by Egor Kamelev on Pexels.
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