UN Decade of Ocean Science Endorses OA Program
The Global Ocean Acidification Observing Network (GOA-ON) hosted the 2nd annual “OA Week,” September 13-17. The program was packed with exciting plenary speakers, updates from regional hubs around the world, and community discussions about OA science and research applications.
The week included a special launch of the UN Decade endorsed program, Ocean Acidification Research for Sustainability (OARS), which will help provide society with the observational and scientific information needed to better understand, monitor for, and adapt to ocean acidification.
The OA Alliance is a proud partner of the OARS program and will support outcomes that provide decision makers, policy leads and stakeholders with applicable knowledge that will inform OA response and build resilience at local to global scales.
OARS will expand to address broader community needs, such as interactions of OA with multiple ocean stressors, as well as greater engagement with and knowledge delivered to specific regions, industry and policy makers. Specific outcomes by 2030 include:
Enable the scientific community to provide ocean acidification data and evidence of known quality, via capacity development, mentoring of early career researchers, facilitating data sharing, and growing regional collaborations, and increased communication through meetings and workshops, allowing for a holistic analysis considering all stakeholder perspectives.
Identify data and evidence needs for mitigation and adaptation strategies, from local to global, by 2022. Communicate these needs to the scientific and science policy community to ensure that science is prioritized (to ensure efficient and quick implementation of actions).
Co-design and implementation of observation strategies in collaboration with data/information producers and end-users by 2025. Identify factors limiting collection of data and implementation of solutions and use OARS activities under 1. as a tool to fix some of those, by for example, continuing to build capacity in developing countries (with a strong user participation). Augment OARS supported by GOA-ON by proactively designing and implementing observation strategies to ensure vulnerable areas are adequately monitored. Provide ocean acidification baseline information for newly developed carbon removal strategies.
Increase understanding of ocean acidification impacts to protect marine life by 2030. Implementation of the newly established framework for biological observation within the ocean acidification monitoring framework (Dupont et al., in review) providing the possibility to improve predictions of vulnerability and resilience to ocean acidification at all temporal and spatial scales.
Provide appropriate data and information necessary to the development of societally relevant predictions and projections, employing new technologies such as digital twins, for all ocean ‘users’ of the impacts of ocean acidification in order to implement adaptation and mitigation by 2030.
Increase public awareness of ocean acidification, its sources and impacts, achieved via ocean literacy and public outreach.
Develop strategies and solutions to enable countries and regions to include measures to reduce ocean acidification in their respective legislation. This outcome is based on achieving the outcomes 1-6.