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Find out more here: https://www.studiocrtq.com/acidifyingocean

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Oceans cover approximately 71% of the Earth and support every living being's life, yet they remain mostly unknown and taken for granted. With this project I wanted to dive deeper, from the surface to the deepest depths, and learn to understand and love this key ecosystem. Grasping the extent of the effects of our actions has been a dazzling yet sad journey that has to be told and shared. I chose a visual style that could express the beauty and fragility of marine ecosystem, and one that could reach the imaginations of users and draw them into this incredible story.

Our Blue Planet is in a state of emergency.
The chemistry of seawater is changing faster than ever before with catastrophic consequences across the whole marine food web.
It's time for us to do something to change this.

Diving into an Acidifying Ocean is part of:

HEARTBEAT OF THE EARTH

a series of online climate artworks

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Oceans cover approximately 71% of the Earth and support every living being's life, yet they remain mostly unknown and taken for granted. With this project I wanted to dive deeper, from the surface to the deepest depths, and learn to understand and love this key ecosystem.

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Virtual Immersive Exhibition: Long Covid We Are Here

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Virtual Immersive Exhibition: Long Covid We Are Here

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See the connected post for the full experience or find out more here: https://www.relational-space.org/

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Connected with the Drumming the Waves project - find out more about them here: https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU21/EGU21-1405.html

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Connected with the Drumming the Waves project - find out more about them here: https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU21/EGU21-1405.html

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Poster presentation at vEGU2021as part of the Art Science Intercase Session on 28 April. More of the session & EGU: https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU21/EGU21-3208.html 

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Poster presentation at vEGU2021as part of the Art Science Intercase Session on 28 April. More of the session & EGU: https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU21/EGU21-3208.html 

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Find out more on the session and see the full poster on our site: https://www.catchingawave.org/vegu21-vienna-austria

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Read more on the Art Science Interface session at this years EGU we took part in and who we connected with.

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Exploring the Art Science Interface | Wednesday 28 April 09:00-12:30 (CEST)

ABOUT THE SESSION: Interdisciplinary collaboration between artists and geoscientists are becoming increasingly invaluable in communicating complex geoscience subjects to non-experts. Topics such as climate change can be contradictory and confusing to the general public, particularly in terms of uncertainty and impact. It is therefore vital that STEM communicators work to find alternative methods to enable dialogue between experts and the wider public on how to face and respond to these increasingly prevalent topics. It is becoming increasingly evident that both the scientific and the artist communities have a shared interest and responsibility in raising awareness of the limits to our planetary boundaries and the fragile stability and resilience of our Earth-System. In the past, this issue has been addressed mostly through traditional educational methods. However, there is mounting evidence that science-art collaborations can play a pivotal and vital role in this context by co-creating new ways of research and by stimulating the discussion by providing emotional and human context through the arts.

This session will combine a traditional academic poster session showcasing interdisciplinary research which will explore the dialogues between the geosciences and the arts alongside a display of art that aims to visually showcase these practises in action. Through symbiotically mixing STEM and the arts together in this way, the session aims to enable a discussion on how to use the two to explore and communicate the social, economic, political and environmental factors facing society and drive improved communication. In this edition, there will be a special spotlight on science/art collaboration that has been used to tackle the topic of planet sustainability.

09:23-09:25 | EGU21-3208

Catching a Wave: the Ripple Effect of Transdisciplinarity

#vEGU21

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vEGU21 | Vienna, Austria | 19-30.4.2021 | Catchingawave

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Exploring the Art Science Interface | Wednesday 28 April 09:00-12:30 (CEST) ABOUT THE SESSION: Interdisciplinary collaboration between artists and geoscientists are becoming increasingly invaluable in communicating complex geoscience subjects to non-experts. Topics such as climate change can be contradictory and confusing to the general public, particularly in terms of uncertainty and impact.

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Presented during Wednesday session on Art & Science

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Alps-to-Sea changes explained by citizens

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Alps-to-Sea changes explained by citizens

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Poster presented on the session on Art & Science at JUAS 2020: by Anna Maria Addamo, European Commission, Joint Research Centre

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The ripple effect of transdisciplinarity

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The ripple effect of transdisciplinarity

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International Conference on Sustainable Art Research

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JIAS2020

JIAS 2020

JIAS 2020

The I International Conference on Sustainable Art Research (JIAS2020) seeks to be a virtual meeting point for creators and scientists, researchers, teachers, students and professionals who work in areas related to art, science and sustainability understood in all its variants .

KEYNOTE

SPEAKERS

JENNIFER PARKER

Jennifer Parker is an artist and professor of Art and Digital Art & New Media at the University of California Santa Cruz where she is the founding Director of the OpenLab Collaborative Research Center ( openlabresearch.com)

Parker investigates methods of Arts Integration in Higher Education by combining creative research practices with science, engineering, and technology. As an artist, Parker carves sites for collective entanglement between disciplines. Facilitating, identifying and determining the boundaries of complex, multi-dimensional space with the aim to develop (a sense of) community to encourage learning, and inform and develop the practice of its members. Her methods of inquiry build on lab and studio visits, literature reviews, and conversations with faculty and students across disciplines triggering a heuristic learning process to pursue creative research for exhibitions and publications.

​

Director of the National Museum of Fine Arts and professor at the University of the Arts of Cuba.

He has given lectures on contemporary art at European, Latin American and United States universities. He was the main curator and director of the eleventh and the twelfth edition of the Havana Biennial. Curator of the Cuban Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011 and 2013 and curator of the Cuba Pavilion at the recently completed Milan Triennial of Architecture and Design. He has curated several exhibitions in different parts of the world. As part of his curatorial work, he has worked with artists such as JR, Gabriel Orozco, Yang Fudong, Sislej Xhafa, Jannis Kounellis, Marina Abramovic, Andrés Serrano, Michael Bielisky, Albert Oehlen, Gregor Schneider, Tino Seghal and many others.

​

JORGE FERNÁNDEZ

Director Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, La Habana, Cuba.

INVITED SPEAKERS

Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master in Research in Art and Creation from the UCM. She started working in the mid-eighties, developing different pictorial techniques and research processes on color and matter.

At the end of the 90s, she began to be interested in simple events of daily life but with a different look. From this moment on she is aware that any idea can be interesting. In 1998/99 she carried out the street action: The sound of this space, in which the recycling of glass was used to create new sounds.

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In 2007, in the making of Bordeando Villanueva, is when she feels the work process is the most important part of the artistic work. This work is a reflection on the limits, where a parallelism was made between the limits of art and theboundar ies of the territory. The fact of walking the 40 km. of the perimeter made her feel the experience of living on the edge.

From this moment on, art and life can no longer be separated. Art becomes for her the place where she solves, investigates, learns and lives.

TRINIDAD IRISARRI

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JIAS2020 JIAS 2020 JIAS 2020 The I International Conference on Sustainable Art Research (JIAS2020) seeks to be a virtual meeting point for creators and scientists, researchers, teachers, students and professionals who work in areas related to art, science and sustainability understood in all its variants .

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Transformaciones para una economía oceánica sostenible

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Transformaciones para una economía oceánica sostenible

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Una visión para la protección, la producción
y la prosperidad

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Transformations for a Sustainable Ocean Economy

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Transformations for a Sustainable Ocean Economy

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A Vision for Protection, Production and Prosperity

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Discover the story of the one place we all call home - Our Planet, a groundbreaking Netflix original documentary series.

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We are here to challenge many of the commonly held assumptions about our water systems and change how people think about water.

Our goal is to bust the global sense of impending doom by painting an alternative, optimistic water future and mapping out the ways to get there.

We believe that even one person with enough knowledge can make a difference and inspire a movement. We are here to provide that knowledge.

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OUR MISSION

We are here to challenge many of the commonly held assumptions about our water systems and change how people think about water.

Our goal is to bust the global sense of impending doom by painting an alternative, optimistic water future and mapping out the ways to get there.

We believe that even one person with enough knowledge can make a difference and inspire a movement. We are here to provide that knowledge.

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'Brave Blue World' is the first honest and hopeful documentary that will paint an optimistic picture of how humanity is adopting new technologies and innovations to re-think how we manage water.

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Find out all about it here: https://www.catchingawave.org/planetary-wave-project

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Have a look at this paper on

Evolving the narrative for protecting a rapidly changing ocean, post‐COVID‐19

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D. Laffoley

Corresponding Author

IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas, IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), Gland, Switzerland
Correspondence
D. Laffoley, IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas, IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), 28 rue Mauverney, CH‐1196 Gland, Switzerland.

Email: danlaffoley@btinternet.com
Search for more papers by this author

P.C. Reid

School of Marine and Biological Sciences, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK

The Laboratory, The Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey, Marine Biological Association, Citadel Hill, Plymouth, UK
Search for more papers by this author

First published:

Abstract

1. The ocean is the linchpin supporting life on Earth, but it is in declining health due to an increasing footprint of human use and climate change. Despite notable successes in helping to protect the ocean, the scale of actions is simply not now meeting the overriding scale and nature of the ocean's problems that confront us.

2. Moving into a post‐COVID‐19 world, new policy decisions will need to be made. Some, especially those developed prior to the pandemic, will require changes to their trajectories; others will emerge as a response to this global event. Reconnecting with nature, and specifically with the ocean, will take more than good intent and wishful thinking. Words, and how we express our connection to the ocean, clearly matter now more than ever before.

3. The evolution of the ocean narrative, aimed at preserving and expanding options and opportunities for future generations and a healthier planet, is articulated around six themes: (1) all life is dependent on the ocean; (2) by harming the ocean, we harm ourselves; (3) by protecting the ocean, we protect ourselves; (4) humans, the ocean, biodiversity, and climate are inextricably linked; (5) ocean and climate action must be undertaken together; and (6) reversing ocean change needs action now.

4. This narrative adopts a 'One Health' approach to protecting the ocean, addressing the whole Earth ocean system for better and more equitable social, cultural, economic, and environmental outcomes at its core. Speaking with one voice through a narrative that captures the latest science, concerns, and linkages to humanity is a precondition to action, by elevating humankind's understanding of our relationship with 'planet Ocean' and why it needs to become a central theme to everyone's lives. We have only one ocean, we must protect it, now. There is no 'Ocean B'.

1 INTRODUCTION

When the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was asked what made his job difficult, he is alleged to have replied 'Events, dear boy, events'. As it is with politics, so it is with the world. Rare though they are, some events shape the way everyone sees, relates to, and responds to the world around them. The COVID‐19 pandemic is one of those events. It has altered the way much of the global population thinks, lives, and behaves. The pandemic has been a violent rupture of our experience of normality, and for many it has led to profound suffering and loss, and at the same time directly or indirectly affecting the lives of ocean‐dependent coastal communities (Bennett et al., 2020). Though the outbreak of the virus has caused huge global disruption of social and economic activity and either the cancellation or postponement of key ocean protection events, it has shown that large‐scale urgent change is possible, but not without challenges (Bavel et al., 2020).

Some of the changes that have happened as a result of COVID‐19, at least in the short term, have been positive for the environment, such as the rapid decrease in atmospheric pollutants (and associated deaths) arising from decreased transportation, cleaner beaches, and reduced environmental noise levels (Chen et al., 2020; Zambrano‐Monserrate, Ruano & Sanchez‐Alcade, 2020). On the negative side, however, many have been very damaging for the ocean, such as the increase in generation of plastic waste, a decrease in waste recycling (Klemeš et al., 2020; Zambrano‐Monserrate, Ruano & Sanchez‐Alcade, 2020), major disruptions to the blue economy, and significant impacts worldwide on the management of protected areas due to a lack of tourist funding, amongst other issues (Hockings et al., 2020).

During the recovery phase of COVID‐19, the challenge will be how to sustain a green recovery and effectively communicate the need to address other crises, such as the climate emergency and the rapidly degrading ocean, and to manage the pressure for rapid economic recovery by directing it at a more sustainable path (Rosenbloom & Markard, 2020). As we move into a post‐COVID‐19 world, new policy decisions will need to be made. Some, especially those that were being developed prior to the pandemic, will require changes to their trajectories; others will emerge as a response to this global event. For ocean conservation, this is an opportunity to set out what should follow.

There is a growing general sentiment that what went before is not what should continue as world economies reboot and the global population re‐emerges from their nationally imposed lockdowns. An example of this is the EU's Green Deal (EU, 2019), which has now been supplemented by a Green Recovery Plan (EU, 2020). However, at the same time, there is evidence that some governments have used COVID‐19 as an opportunity to roll back environmental legislation (e.g. Tollefson, 2020). A change of paradigm is needed to help develop new social norms that will in turn create new incentives for governments, the private sector, and individuals to practise more sustainable behaviour (Claudet et al., 2020a). This paper is therefore not, as such, directly about COVID‐19, but it is about what that paradigm means and what needs to follow the global pandemic. The narrative it proposes to connect, inspire, and act for the ocean is a contribution to the green recovery process that many are now focused on seeing happen (e.g. Bleischwitz, 2020).

By exploring the issues from an ocean perspective that have led us to this precarious position with nature and the planet in the first place, this paper sets out an evolution of the narrative to put the ocean centre stage in such recovery processes. As the author and entrepreneur Mohith Agadi once said, 'Environment is no one's property to destroy; it's everyone's responsibility to protect'. We hope that this paper will therefore be a valuable information source to policy advisers and decision‐makers and for all engaged stakeholders, including civil society, as we inch slowly towards a post‐COVID‐19 world, where we all need to try harder to live much more in harmony with nature than we did before the pandemic took hold.

2 APPRECIATING OCEAN VALUES, AND WHY WORDS MATTER

Set starkly against this lack of awareness is the fact that the ocean's vast size means it has a major influence on the functioning of the entire planet (Steffen et al., 2020). The ocean provides benefits that can be individually seen, tasted, and experienced. Seafood and aquaculture from the ocean are critical for global food security, as they provide around 20% of the animal protein and 6.7% of all protein consumed worldwide (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2018; Costello et al., 2019). Diverse cultures, societies, and knowledge bases are integrally linked to marine and coastal biodiversity and the social-ecological systems they support. For example, communities and infrastructure benefit through mangroves, seagrasses, and saltmarshes that provide coastal protection from storms and erosion. There is also increasing evidence that humans can derive increased fitness and mental health because of proximity to the ocean (Fleming et al., 2014; Fleming et al., 2019).

In the context of COVID‐19 and human health more generally, the diversity of ocean life also provides a genetic storehouse of adaptive potential in the face of a changing climate (Blasiak et al., 2020). It is the source of new pharmaceutical products, which have been discovered at rates of up to 2.5 times the industry average (Blasiak et al., 2020). To date, over 34,000 marine natural products have been discovered (MarinLit, 2020), holding great potential to improve human life and health. Some hold high potential to provide cures (Sagar, Kaur & Minneman, 2010; Gentile et al., 2020), such as the sponge, Aplysina, which when damaged produces chemicals known as bromotyrosines (Binnewerg et al., 2020). Bromotyrosines are responsible for the antiviral, antibacterial, and antiparasitic properties of the sponge. Of more recent relevance regarding COVID‐19 are the unusual nucleoside properties of sponges (nucleosides are best known as the four building blocks of DNA). Unlike DNA, a sponge can fill its body with just a single nucleoside, which has been found to be powerful in halting viral infections by mimicking DNA to trick the virus. Single sponge nucleosides cannot be linked in a complex intertwined chain like human DNA, and so, as the viral body tries to replicate, the single nucleosides will not react in the expected manner and DNA construction is terminated (Bergmann & Feeney, 1951; Hall, 2019). Antiviral drugs have since been developed that harness the mimicking qualities of nucleosides, and one of these, Remdesivir, is on trial as a treatment for COVID‐19 (Seley‐Radtke & Yates, 2018; Eastman et al., 2020; Seley‐Radtke, 2020).

Action must be taken to heed the warning signs before it becomes too late. Earth's history shows that if the ocean rapidly or appreciably departs from the status quo sustained through feedback and self‐regulatory processes over hundreds or thousands of years (exemplified by changes in temperature, acidity, and oxygen), such major environmental perturbations have always resulted in incredibly challenging times for life on Earth, often leading to mass extinctions (Barnosky et al., 2011), such as the Permian mass extinction (the Great Dying) that saw ~90% of all marine taxa go extinct (Payne & Clapham, 2012; Burger, Estrada & Gustin, 2019; Shen et al., 2019). There are real and mounting dangers that we may win battles but ultimately lose the war on decline and degradation of the ocean by simply not using the right narratives to connect us to the importance of the ocean, the realities of a post‐COVID world, and the need to alter our course (Lubchenco & Gaines, 2019; Claudet et al., 2020a).

3 WHY A BETTER, MORE PRECISE, AND UPDATED OCEAN NARRATIVE IS NEEDED

To succeed post‐COVID‐19 in a collective vision of a healthy, thriving, and more effectively managed and protected ocean, we need to further evolve the ocean narrative (Lubchenco & Gaines, 2019). Unfortunately, most of the world's population lacks a basic understanding of our total dependence on the systems that sustain us and all other life on Earth. Reconnecting with nature, therefore, and specifically with the ocean which is the lifeblood of planet Earth, will take more than good intent and wishful thinking. Put simply, people do not understand how deeply 'embedded' we all are in the systems that sustain life on Earth, how those systems exert a huge influence on human well‐being, and how humans now, in turn, exert such a huge influence on the functioning and viability of such an Earth system.

Beneath the surface, there have been notable conservation successes (e.g. Duarte et al., 2020; Knowlton, 2020), but overall, despite the grand pronouncements, it is fair to say we continue to increase extraction of resources and add more pollutants, discounting the damage to the ocean as minor problems or acceptable losses, against perceived 'essential' exploitative gain. The growing global population is increasingly used by sectors, such as fisheries, as justification of ever greater levels of exploitation at the clear sacrifice of nature (Steneck & Pauly, 2019). These attempts are increasingly 'dressed up' by affiliating them to the conservation flag. This behaviour is self‐destructive. Cutting through the rhetoric and realizing that we are continuing on the same path with no reprieve for the ocean from the pressures of exploitation and climate breakdown and expecting a different-more positive outcome-was used by Einstein as the definition of madness.

Whilst some inroads have been made in policy dialogues over the last decades to link human well‐being to a stable climate in an attempt to control our carbon emissions (not entirely successfully; Stoknes, 2015), the same cannot be said about connecting human well‐being with the health of the ocean. We use 'our' in this paper in respect of the ocean and planet simply to point out that it is humankind's responsibility to sort out the problems that we have created. This is to allow the ocean to contribute maximally to human well‐being by restoring it to full health, and in so doing to take the opportunity to do better for ourselves, the ocean, and the planet.

Words, and how we express our connection to the ocean, clearly matter now more than ever before. We must acknowledge the importance of the ocean and reset and reframe the discussion in the face of direct human impacts, such as overfishing and habitat destruction, as well as climate disruption. Reflections from the experience of COVID‐19 show us the discussion needs to be substantive and focused. The global community faces a decision point: relaxing back into the status quo of life before the pandemic, beset with all its problems and issues, or building a green (blue) recovery to support economies within the context of a healthier planet. It is clear the latter has significant advantages to human well‐being and the environment.

There is the opportunity to create a new, promising and more equitable future, where humanity can realize its full potential over the long term by utilizing nature‐based solutions much more, and living in greater harmony with nature. There is also an urgent need to transform the ocean narrative and how it connects to people, policies, and priorities, as science now clearly shows the ocean is integral to the Earth system (Steffen et al., 2020). Humans are part of one unified Earth system (Schellnhuber, 1999), and through that realization it is clear the ocean is central to human well‐being (and vice versa). The current narrative, however, does not connect people with actions in the way that is needed; if it did, we would have made more progress by now. This statement applies equally to the global climate crisis.

Experience has shown the importance of getting the narrative right, and the ocean conservation community itself has a key role, first and foremost, in delivering consistent facts through the diversity of communication routes at its disposal. If we are inconsistent, then others will be too. Some may even exploit such weaknesses in approach to justify their own ends, which usually relates to sustaining the status quo or increasing exploitation and exploration pressures on an already fragile, damaged ocean system. We already know-for example, from the works of Aristotle and Copernicus in ancient human history, to the impressive modern technology displayed by the USA, Russia, China, and other space‐faring nations in more recent times-that we live on a blue planet with water covering 71% of its surface. The ocean efficiently absorbs infrared, red, and other wavelengths of light from the sun that penetrate its surface, leaving only blue to be reflected into space. In an effort to satisfy the human psyche's quest for order, hydrographers have overlain wholly artificial hydrographic boundaries to create the defined spaces of the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Arctic Oceans (International Hydrographic Organization, 1986), with the fifth basin, the Southern Ocean, even now still not recognized by all countries. Look more closely and there is only one ocean (Figure 1).

The ocean is an immense interconnected and heterogeneous whole that provides immeasurable benefits to humanity and the planet. It is modulated by a range of physical oceanographic processes, as well as by wind, solar heating, and precipitation. These processes include the thermohaline circulation system on a large scale and more localized coastal currents that are influenced by geomorphology, weather, and tidal conditions. The ocean also comprises a vast array of seabed and water column habitats, each home to different communities of animals, plants, algae, and micro‐organisms. Some habitats are connected through their use by marine species at different stages of their life cycle; for example, reef fish that use coral reefs as adults and mangroves as juveniles, or seafloor animals whose early life stages (larvae) reside in surface waters (e.g. Nagelkerken et al., 2002; Cowan & Sponaugle, 2009; Nagelkerken et al., 2017). This variation across local to large scales increases the resilience of the ocean, and the need to transcend jurisdictional boundaries is an important consideration in the application of area‐based management tools.

The political behaviour of governments over the past decades shows that referring to the 'basins' as 'oceans' makes it justifiable to apply different management standards in different regions (e.g. with different regional fisheries management bodies; Pretlove & Blasiak, 2018). The Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has long campaigned for the need to use the singular form 'ocean' rather than the commonly used plural 'oceans'. More recently, campaigning to drop the 's' from ocean 1 has been seen as a further step towards improving 'ocean literacy' amongst policymakers, the media, teachers, the public, and scientists. This has helped recognize the importance of the ocean to the health of the planet and humanity and helped strengthen marine governance for the benefit of present and future generations. 2 We refer to the atmosphere in the singular, and so we should do the same and refer to the ocean in the same way. It is very unfortunate, therefore, that key individuals and organizations leading ocean conservation efforts, scientists, and donors supporting the ocean community so consistently get this wrong and keep still referring to 'oceans'. The wording matters, especially if we wish to drive protection and management forward with a single voice and in a more consistent way. World Oceans Day should more correctly and impactfully be referred to as World Ocean Day. The ocean conservation community must shoulder more responsibility to get the narrative right: we have only one ocean, we must protect it, there is no 'Ocean B'.

Another narrative issue that the ocean community has a prominent role in correcting relates to statements about 'managing the ocean'. No! The ocean cannot be directly 'managed', but our activities can be managed, and in this way reduce impacts on the ocean. Similarly, precision is lacking in other related areas. The new target of 'at least 30%' as a global target for coverage of the ocean by fully or highly protected MPAs (Horta e Costa et al., 2016)-the level of protection that will most benefit biodiversity (Zupan et al., 2018a)-is clearly and specifically worded, yet time and time again the ocean conservation community refers to the target as '30%'. The phrase 'at least 30%' is a direction, whereas '30%' is a definitive destination.

There is a scientific reason for using 'at least'; this refers to at least 30% of representative ecosystems; and because these ecosystems are differently distributed, this results in a need for more than 30% of the ocean area to be protected (O'Leary et al., 2019). Also, because knowledge and analytical powers are increasing year on year and it takes years for the global conservation community to agree on things, we now know that stating exactly '30%' is already outdated. The target was developed and agreed at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Parks Congress in Sydney, Australia, in 2014, and since then much more is known about the scale and nature of the impacts and challenges that we face. In fact, the latest scientific analysis shows that at least 30% is now the barest minimum needed to properly protect the ocean (Woodley et al., 2019). Besides, this percentage only accounts for present threats on the ocean, whereas they are increasing at an unprecedented pace (Jouffray et al., 2020).

It is also important to specify that the 'at least 30%' target is for fully or highly protected MPAs (Horta e Costa et al., 2016). Experience has already demonstrated that a high proportion of existing MPAs lack management plans (Rogers et al., 2020), are often weakly enforced (Edgar et al., 2014; Gill et al., 2017), or permit activities that damage biodiversity (Dureuil et al., 2018; Zupan et al., 2018b).

In taking forward a fit‐for‐purpose ocean narrative, it is critically important that the differences between these two discussion threads are recognized and understood (i.e. the amount of ocean we actually need to protect versus the lesser amount of ocean nations feel they can protect), otherwise current political pressures and sectoral interests will deprive the world of the opportunity to state goals for sustainable development and the actual level of action needed for a better tomorrow. There is a clear choice here between the debate and decisions being led by what people 'think they can do', rather than what all the science and evidence says we 'must do' now. Future generations looking back at our pandemic‐compromised world with an ocean full of warning signs may characterize the former as 'reckless and self‐centred' and the latter as 'wise and enlightened' leadership. This issue of consistency and accuracy in the ocean narrative, therefore, is not just about particular phrases, but also about how the ocean community ensures they are founded in science. They need to be based on facts and experience, so the overall approach to ocean conservation holds together, makes sense, and has the right degree of ambition.

Alongside direct, often local, management issues, such as overfishing, pollution, and habitat destruction, a new range of global climate‐related drivers are significantly increasing pressure on the ocean. In the last 15 years, six major areas of concern have been documented in the scientific literature, which are now widely recognized as issues of global concern (e.g. Intergovernmental Science‐Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), 2019; see Appendix 1 for details):

Significant and accelerating heating of the ocean and associated oxygen loss (Laffoley & Baxter, 2016; Laffoley & Baxter, 2019).

Significant sea‐level rise and linked loss of coastal natural protection (Li et al., 2020).

Significant regional acidification with a worsening trend (Ono et al., 2019; Terhaar, Kwiatowski & Bopp, 2020)

Significant alterations to wind regimes and perturbations to major ocean currents and upwelling systems, which shape ocean ecosystems and human societies (Hu et al., 2020).

Significant changes in patterns of ocean primary production, ecosystems, and species distribution resulting from increased warming and stratification at low to mid latitudes and decline of sea ice (Lotze et al., 2019).

Significant impact on marine fisheries (Thiault et al., 2019).

These new issues are significant at the Earth/ocean system scale, and they interact with one another to greatly exacerbate the scale of concern and impacts. It is these combined issues that are driving a much greater urgency and need for ambition to recover and restore the ocean state. A clear updated ocean narrative needs to lie at the heart of such a process.

4 RESETTING THE OCEAN NARRATIVE POST‐COVID‐19

The COVID‐19 pandemic has provided an opportunity to reflect on our relationship with nature, but the overriding climate and biodiversity crises have not gone away. Emissions continue to rise, and climate impact problems continue to escalate and develop (IPCC, 2019). The same is true of serious losses of ecosystems and associated biodiversity driven by overfishing, habitat destruction, and pollution (IPBES, 2019; Rogers et al., 2020). Resetting the narrative requires better navigation of these driving forces and a need to remind ourselves of our place in the world, our links to nature, and our dependence on a healthy, functioning ocean.

If we are to reconnect the dots in an orderly manner to lead us to better actions and conclusions, a joined‐up narrative is needed to stimulate integrated action. Politically, the world agreed to look at linking climate and biodiversity in 2014 at COP21 in Paris, but there has been limited progress to put such words into practice. Notably, the decision text at COP25 in 2019 recognizes the ocean as an 'integral part of the Earth's climate system', highlights the need to ensure 'the integrity of ocean and coastal ecosystems', and requests the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, a United Nations (UN) climate change advisory group, to open a dialogue on the ocean and climate. The 44 submissions to the UN addressing content and format of this dialogue make clear the urgency of implementing the Paris commitments, informed by a clear ocean narrative.

Through a workshop held in London, but conducted mainly virtually, the International Programme on the State of the Ocean drew together leading marine scientists to pose them this very challenge. Their response was to create a six‐point post‐COVID‐19 narrative (Table 1) together with a list of the fundamental services the ocean provides to humankind (Appendix 1) and the case for urgent action ( Supporting Information Data S1).

4.1 Narrative themes

4.1.1 All life is dependent on the ocean

Nurturing the ocean is essential to safeguard our future as it provides valuable and vital ecosystem services, such as oxygen production and climate regulation, as well as food, energy, mineral, genetic, and cultural and recreational services (Figure 2; Barbier, 2017). Coastal communities and economies are reliant on these services for their sustenance and persistence, which have also been challenged by the COVID‐19 pandemic. The provision of these services and access to appropriately managed resources are critical to accomplishing the sustainable development goals adopted by all member states of the UN to eliminate poverty and promote sustainable development (Singh et al., 2018; Claudet et al., 2020a). Our survival is accordingly dependent on a healthy ocean, but from afar it may seem to some more akin to a parasitic relationship, where resources are being extracted well beyond safe, sustainable levels, with little thought for ocean health or for the plight of future generations. If we are alert to the problems, we often simply shift our baselines (Pauly, 1995; Jackson et al., 2001), forgetting how the ocean was and instead use more recent data on partly depleted resources to justify our actions.

4.1.2 By harming the ocean, we harm ourselves

We have ample scientific data that confirm certain large‐scale human activities are damaging to the current and future state and condition of the ocean, from which humankind derives the very benefits we value, and yet there is little action to cease these practices. Out of sight and out of mind can no longer be the excuse when marine species, habitats, and ecosystem structure and functions are being impacted and lost. In some cases, such as unsustainable fisheries, activities are even subsidised with taxpayers' money (Sumaila et al., 2016). Although there is a process of environmental impact assessments in place in most nations, they have not been effective in many cases, in part because of stakeholder manipulation (Enríquez‐de‐Salamanca, 2018).

Intertidal and subtidal habitats are closest to human populations and, therefore, have arguably been most impacted by anthropogenic activities. For example, global mangrove cover decreased by 0.2-0.7% annually between 2000 and 2012, with some countries suffering significantly greater decreases (Hamilton & Casey, 2016); coastal development is a primary cause of this decline. These activities have many impacts on ecosystems, including direct (e.g. building on habitats) and indirect impacts (e.g. increased erosion and sedimentation from land clearance and forestry that increases water turbidity), alongside the loss of appreciable carbon storage that such ecosystems provide.

Coral reefs have been estimated to reduce damage to terrestrial assets by US$4 billion annually through coastal protection (Beck et al., 2018). Yet, these very same coral‐reef ecosystems are predicted to be reduced to 10-30% of their area of extent with a 1.5°C increase in temperature resulting from climate disruption. If the temperature is allowed to increase by 2°C then the remaining area shrinks to just 1% (IPCC, 2019). Such a narrow window of change in environmental conditions demonstrates the linkages between climate and biodiversity, and the importance of acting quickly to mitigate climate breakdown to prevent the large‐scale transformation of a habitat already at high risk of impact from sea‐surface temperature rise (Gattuso et al., 2015). Rapid and sustained reduction in the emissions of carbon dioxide (CO ₂) and other powerful greenhouse gases, such as methane, is the only way of mitigating climate breakdown impacts on coral reefs. Other conservation, adaptation, and restoration options will progressively narrow and become more expensive to society as time progresses and as the effects of ocean warming, acidification, and deoxygenation become more intense (Gattuso et al., 2015).

Additionally, it is unconscionable that new major industrial activities go ahead despite a lack of informative data and/or mitigation considerations. For instance, it is expected that deep‐seabed mining for metals, such as cobalt and nickel, will begin within the next decade, justified on the basis of a need for renewable energy technologies, despite the potential wide‐ranging and long‐lasting impacts, including inevitable biodiversity loss (Niner et al., 2018; Jones, Amon & Chapman, 2018), with recovery on human timescales an impossibility in the abyssal ocean (Jones et al., 2017; Simon‐Lledó et al., 2019). The money required for successful deep‐seabed mining would be better invested in the development of technologies that use alternative metals and other materials, recycling of metals and rare earth elements, and forcing compliance with such measures, rather than driving more and more unsustainable extraction of finite resources (Levin, Amon & Lily, 2020).

Given the global scale of ocean challenges, many large‐scale geoengineering solutions have also been suggested: marine cloud brightening (to increase ocean reflectivity), artificial upwelling (energy and fish production), downwelling (hurricane diversion), mineralization of CO ₂ in rock under the sea floor (carbon storage), and adding carbonate minerals to the ocean (to enhance alkalinity). Several assessments, however, have identified significant risks associated with such projects, so any possible geoengineering solutions to climate disruption require a lot more investigation (Shepherd, 2012; Hoegh‐Guldberg et al., 2019). In any such endeavours, the precautionary principle is the only sensible approach when considering future activities.

4.1.3 By protecting the ocean, we protect ourselves

In the past, obtaining provisions from the ocean was too easily taken for granted; the ocean seemed 'too big to fail' until it became increasingly clear that human impacts were, and are, threatening the ocean's functionality and capacity to provide these services (Lubchenco & Gaines, 2019). These issues are now too large to ignore. It is abundantly clear that we protect ourselves by protecting the ocean.

If we are to protect ourselves and the many services the ocean provides, it is critical that a clear accounting of MPAs and other forms of effective area‐based conservation measures is carried out as we work towards achieving more appropriate targets. In addition, an adequate level of protection needs to be implemented and effectively managed; MPAs need to be climate smart and resilient in the face of global change (Tittensor et al., 2019).

Though we have stressed the importance of spatial conservation measures here, it is important to emphasize that this does not mean the rest of the ocean is left to business‐as‐usual exploitation. For example, marine reserves in themselves do not necessarily reduce overfishing and may even displace fishing activity to areas where it has previously been low (e.g. Kaiser, 2005; Agardy, Notarbartolo di Sciara & Christie, 2011). They also provide little protection from issues such as long‐range pollutants or invasive species (Agardy et al., 2011; Burfeind et al., 2013). It is therefore of great importance to manage the entire ocean for all activities so that they are sustainable and maximize ocean and human health (Rogers et al., 2020).

4.1.4 Humans, the ocean, biodiversity, and climate are inextricably linked

The ocean forms a critical part of the Earth's life‐support system through its modulation of climate (Figure 3; Stocker, 2015). It also directly controls the habitability of the coastal zone, the provision of food, recreation, livelihoods, transport of goods (shipping), and information (internet cables) (Bindoff et al., 2019). The ocean, from the surface to its greatest depths, is a vast reservoir of heat. Water can hold approximately 4,000 times as much heat as air. By taking up 93% of the excess heat from global warming (Levitus et al., 2012; Reid, 2016), and by absorbing more than a quarter of the excess CO ₂ associated with anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions over the past half century (Laffoley & Baxter, 2019), the ocean has protected the planet from more extreme heating (Houghton, 2007; McKinley et al., 2017). The ocean is also the largest body of water on Earth, controlling the water cycle by regulating evaporation, rainfall, terrestrial runoff, and sea ice formation. These, in turn, influence ocean circulation, which modulates the ocean carbon, heat, and salt budgets.

But this overwhelming influence comes with a cost for ocean ecosystems, and for people (Pörtner et al., 2014; Bindoff et al., 2019). The ocean has buffered climate breakdown over the last century by absorbing ever greater amounts of heat and carbon, but there are indications that the role it has played until now is changing. Both the rate of warming (Cheng et al., 2019) and the global mean circulation that transports heat by currents towards the poles from warm equatorial regions has accelerated (Hu et al., 2020). Based on the work of Cheng and colleagues, it is estimated that the ocean is warming up to 40% faster than was estimated by the IPCC ( 2013) report. The two main sinks (ocean and land) for greenhouse gas CO ₂, which are the major pathways for lowering concentrations in the atmosphere, appear also to be declining in their ability to do this at a fast rate, 0.54% per annum (Bennedsen, Hillebrand & Koopman, 2019). When combined, these two factors mean that climate disruption, as represented by a changing ocean, is possibly happening at a much faster rate than climate models have been predicting.

The solution to the aforementioned issues is to first recognize the essential values that the ocean provides for all life on Earth and then, in joined‐up actions across all sectors of society, to strengthen existing and discover new solutions to overcome the challenges everyone now faces. Some are straightforward, such as taking the pressures off the system to enable the ocean to recover and become healthier into the future. This should be a multi‐pronged strategy, combining drastic cuts in anthropogenic emissions of CO ₂ and other potent greenhouse gases with dramatic scaling‐up of full and effective protection for ecosystems in the ocean, better provisions to protect mobile species, and a return to recognizable, demonstrable, and accountable sustainability for all activities conducted anywhere in the ocean.

Other strategies across society to join up actions will need to be stronger and more inventive. They will need to include more help to protect wide‐ranging marine species whose conservation is dependent on wider measures rather than just MPAs, as well as new innovative private-public partnerships. An example of this is the rapidly growing cuboid satellite industry and all the new technology they have to observe the Earth and ocean in hitherto unimaginable detail, and thus revolutionize surveillance and monitoring capabilities, and the prosecution of those individuals and nations who undermine everyone else's efforts to do the right thing and protect the ocean.

4.1.5 Ocean and climate action must be undertaken together

Humans reside at the heart of the climate problem and must wholeheartedly embrace the ocean as part of the climate solution. Feedbacks from human influence on ocean temperature may reinforce and exacerbate global warming. Solutions to these problems must be ambitious and wide‐reaching. Protecting the ocean will require more than achieving the Paris Agreement greenhouse gas emission targets. Even if they are achieved, some parts of the ocean and dependent people in coastal cities and regions and small island states will still suffer (IPCC, 2018; Laffoley & Baxter, 2018).

The Paris Agreement only considers national emissions. It does not include, for example, aircraft and shipping emissions, which in the case of the pre‐COVID‐19UK, for example, added a further 57% on top of the current national emissions (Committee on Climate Change, 2019). Given the importance, and until very recently unrecognized key role, that the ocean plays in mitigating climate breakdown, much greater resources need to be allocated to understanding the ocean and its climate role so that humanity is in a better position to predict and adapt to the speed and scale of change in the future. This applies to addressing potential changes in the ocean that may initiate tipping points/regime shifts in global climate (e.g. Lenton, 2020). Short of yet‐to‐be developed innovations and geoengineering solutions, achieving the required reduction in carbon emissions will require dramatic changes in current approaches to ensure a habitable world for future generations. Though such benefits may not be immediately obvious, they are essential as they will ultimately lead to cleaner air, less acidic water, and so on. This new narrative is therefore formulated and focused on the opportunity for humanity to live within its means and to achieve its full potential in that context, both now and in the future, whilst preventing our current actions from reducing our future potential or even destroying it. Most people's actions are driven by personal gain, not community or future community gain. Yet time is not on our side to address these shortcomings, as the decadal timescale to effect changes such as these is rapidly reducing with little sign of the serious at‐scale responses that will be required from governments.

Direct ocean‐based mitigation actions include increasing the generation of renewable energy (solar and wind) from the ocean, the greening of ocean industries (to achieve carbon neutrality), and enhancement of the natural carbon sequestration capabilities of blue carbon ecosystems through expansion and restoration of coastal mangroves, seagrasses, and saltmarshes, and carbon storage in seabed sediments and biogenic reefs. Hoegh‐Guldberg et al. ( 2019), based on the aforementioned options, plus possible sub‐seabed (geological) carbon storage, calculate that these initiatives could reduce global carbon emissions by 4 Gt of CO ₂ equivalent per annum by 2030 relative to projected business‐as‐usual emissions. During the COVID‐19 pandemic it is estimated that CO ₂ emissions fell by around 17 Mt per day, equivalent to 6.2 Gt per annum (Le Quéré et al., 2020). 'A sustainable ocean‐based economy can play an essential role in much needed emissions reduction, while providing jobs, supporting food security, sustaining biological diversity and enhancing resilience' (Hoegh‐Guldberg et al., 2019).

However, societal adaptation can and must go further to build ocean resilience to climate stress. From spatial planning and the designation of MPAs to improved fishing and aquaculture practices, new ocean science and ecosystem‐based management, climate consideration must become integral to how we study, perceive, protect, and use the ocean. The benefits will accrue to the ocean economy (Gaines et al., 2019), to the whole of society, and to the health of the planet (Gattuso et al., 2015).

4.1.6 Reversing ocean change needs action now

In many respects, the ocean has been treated as a frontier with open access to its resources, relatively few rules to constrain human activities, and competition to exploit its resources. This has resulted in wasteful exploitation of species, habitats, and ecosystems (Norse, 2005).

The solution to the problems leading to a degradation of marine ecosystems, the services they provide, and their predicted sustained and accelerated decline for the foreseeable future is immediate concerted global action. Such action is not unprecedented at a global scale. The discovery of the ozone hole in Antarctica in 1985 (Farman, Gardiner & Shanklin, 1985) triggered the creation of the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer and the subsequent regulation of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other halogenated ozone‐depleting substances that stimulated the opening of the hole in the first place. Evidence since then suggests that this multilateral agreement has largely succeeded, with evidence that the ozone hole is reducing in size (Banerjee et al., 2020). Vigilance is still required to ensure that CFC production does not increase again, as the expected rate of reduction has slowed, suggesting that unreported new production is occurring that is inconsistent with the protocol (Montzka et al., 2018; Dhomse et al., 2019).

In contrast to how we have dealt with CFCs, the sectoral and fragmented approach to ocean governance underlies our inability to tackle the drivers of degradation of marine ecosystems and, at a broader scale, the Earth system. Failure to recognize the connections between the state of the ocean, human health, and societal well‐being is symptomatic of an archaic view of management of resources for the benefit of a limited number of actors, such as private industry or states.

The connectivity between marine ecosystems (e.g. O'Leary & Roberts, 2016; Popova et al., 2019) means that negative impacts in one place, or on one species, habitat, or ecosystem, inevitably have broader consequences for the ocean. What has not been fully recognized is that they also impact humans at local to global scales.

5 DISCUSSION: THE URGENCY TO TRANSFORM WORDS INTO ACTIONS

The global response to the COVID‐19 pandemic is an example of a rapid and coordinated response to the emergence of a threat to human health, despite its deficiencies (Gates, 2020; Jacobsen, 2020). Preventing, detecting, and controlling such diseases has given rise to the 'One Health' concept (One Health Initiative Task Force, 2008; Annelli et al., 2011), which highlights the transdisciplinary approaches required to address a complex problem that spans humans, animals, and ecosystems (Jacobsen, 2020). The ocean narrative set out in this paper has adopted a 'One Health' approach to protecting the ocean, considering all aspects of ocean problems, including the cultural and economic drivers of degradation and recognizing the broadscale consequences on ecosystems and human health. The intent of this further evolution of the ocean narrative is to raise the ocean on the global agenda and garner the concerted global action required to change the current trajectory of biodiversity loss and decline in ecosystem services and to allow humanity to achieve its full potential (Ord, 2020).

At the core of the narrative is recognition of the need to address the whole Earth‐ocean system for better and more equitable social, cultural, economic, and environmental outcomes. Our 'legacy of inaction' combined with new climate impacts has caught up with us to create an increasingly dangerous mix of changes that threaten current and future ocean functions, values, and benefits. To move forward we need to deal once and for all with the political mismatch between acting now to invest for the future, and not the often‐encountered strategy of political short‐termism to garner re‐election. Though the latter may play out to good effect for individual politicians and their aspirations at national scales, it does little to secure the changes needed at a world scale.

Addressing the needs to respond to the ocean problems, which are now manifest at the global scale, will not only stand a better chance of halting the decline and negative changes now being seen across the whole ocean, but it also represents the best strategy to achieving success in other related areas, such as delivering a 'sustainable ocean economy'. Fundamentally, as was achieved with tackling CFCs, we need to remove the problems associated with 'mind the gap(s)' and recognize the importance of delivering joined‐up sectoral policy development and implementation. If this is not achieved, then the positive actions in one sector can easily be wiped out by other sectors ignoring the ocean warning signs and continuing with business as usual.

Such a strategy and the actions that emerge from it must be guided by recognition of and investment in baselines, which can be used to guide ambition and the creation of successful solutions. We have lost measurable and significant value and benefits from the ocean over the decades, and longer, by not recognizing the opportunities that investment in the ocean can bring, coupled with not internalizing the costs of current activities that damage the ocean, such as overfishing. As it is, such existing industries, coupled with the potential of new damaging ones like deep‐sea mining, take the profits and seldom pay for the damage and consequences of their actions to broader society, and indeed often taxpayers subsidize their endeavours to the tune of billions of pounds. As with climate change impacts, it is predominantly the poor and those least able to pay who shoulder the impacts and costs of such discounting, and so the issue of environmental rights and justice will also need to be central in developing a new ocean agenda in order to address the problems that we are both creating today and have inherited from malpractices in the past.

There is fundamentally, in the middle of all this, the fact that the ocean, as the lifeblood of the planet, merits protection in its own right. The wonder it instils in individuals, its sheer beauty, and the feeling of calm it injects into the soul, all of which benefit human well‐being, must never be forgotten against the base arguments of pounds spent or invested. Sustaining and recovering the ocean is no doubt a key part of intergenerational equity, and actions must now deliver on the ideals that we are merely custodians of the ocean and should pass it on to future generations in no worse shape, and ideally in much better health, than it was passed to us.

The COVID‐19 pandemic is both a wake‐up call and a stark reminder about how all our fates are intrinsically linked. Just as the COVID‐19 pandemic has taught us all about what we now know can happen when people are forced into unnaturally close association with nature, so most people still do not realize just how dependent humanity is on a healthy ocean and its well‐being. We can and need to make clearer the links between human health, our well‐being, and the ocean's fate, whether this be through food, weather, or the oxygen we breathe. We need to rapidly build a greater understanding and appreciation of what that relationship is, why we should value it more, and what we must do to protect it.

Most people still do not appreciate how all our futures are in some way and at some point tied not just to the ocean but to individual species; for example, the horseshoe crab. Few people know that all pharmaceutical companies in the world rely on a particular horseshoe crab species, Limulus polyphemus. This is because the horseshoe crab's milky‐blue blood provides the only known natural source of limulus amoebocyte lysate (e.g. Mehmood, 2019). This is a substance that is extremely sensitive for detecting a contaminant called endotoxin, which is created by bacteria. If even a tiny amount of endotoxin makes its way into vaccines, injectable drugs, or other sterile pharmaceuticals, such as artificial knees and hips, the results can be deadly. Across health care, our well‐being and trust in those very medicines and medical procedures comes down to a reliance on this primitive marine creature. Without this species, medicine as we know it would not exist.

As economies around the world struggle to cope with the COVID‐19 virus, living in the hope of a vaccine so some day we can return to some form of normality, we will owe that (hopefully imminent) success, and the safety of such vaccines, in a large part to the ocean and one of the species that lives in it. This is a stark reminder that it is in all our interests to act now while there is still time to better protect the ocean and recover its health, for our health as a species is absolutely tied to the ocean's health. It is true to say that whether we act or not will depend on widespread recognition of the warning signs we now see at a whole ocean scale. We must heed the warning signs and act with new ambition and at scale to counter and overcome them, because what we do today will without a doubt define all our tomorrows.

6 RECOMMENDATIONS

The COVID‐19 pandemic and the opportunity to reflect on what is happening around that provide an opportunity through a new narrative to improve human well‐being and create a more equitable society and a healthier ocean. The health of the ocean is so closely intertwined with humanity's health that failure is not an option; early action will be more successful and will be less costly. In particular:

We must act now on the science and trends we see and not wait for a perfect solution. The scale and apparently accelerating rate of changes seen in the ocean require a joined‐up, whole‐ocean response to climate and biodiversity.

Current measures proposed or agreed for ocean protection are outdated, too small, too poorly coordinated, and too piecemeal to have an impact at a whole ocean scale given the level of observed changes.

Far more ambitious action is needed now-indecision and delay are at the cost to humanity of delivering the conditions to be able to gain greater benefits and make better choices in the future.

Acting now should focus on developing a 'plan B for ocean recovery' based on the eventuality that downward step‐changes in ocean health will dramatically start to impact humanity-a new 'Marshall‐style' plan for the ocean, akin to the ambition and drive used to rebuild societies after World War II (Wikipedia Contributors, 2019)3 is needed.

Speaking with one voice through a narrative that captures the latest science, concerns, and linkages to humanity is a precondition to action. Success, both now and in the future, can be increased by elevating everyone's understanding of our relationship with our planet's ocean and why it needs to become a central theme to everyone's lives. This includes the first, simple step of dropping the 's', recognizing the ocean as a single entity, and referring to the ocean in the singular.

APPENDIX A: FUNDAMENTAL FACTS ON WHAT THE OCEAN DOES FOR HUMANKIND

BACKGROUND

The healthy functioning of the ocean makes all life on Earth possible. It is essential to human existence and well‐being, providing vital regulating and functioning services. Our planet will not be able to sustain life as we know it if the state of the ocean continues to deteriorate because of human‐induced stressors.

As part of the preparations for the International Programme on the State of the Ocean 4 workshop a survey of the authors was undertaken, and a backing paper was prepared on ocean facts to help inform and ensure that people understand the fundamentals of what the ocean does for humankind. This appendix extracts key points from that paper to explain the role of the ocean, why it matters, and to underpin the urgency of action and the need for a new narrative. It represents the key areas identified by the authors for wider understanding.

SCALE

Physical scale of the ocean

Although water masses across the world are differentiated and habitats are diverse, they are all connected. There is only one ocean and it works at the Earth system level to make life on our planet possible. Damage to any part of the ocean can affect us all. The ocean covers 71% of the surface of the planet, extending vertically to 11,000 m deep in the Mariana Trench and contains close to 1,335 × 10 ⁶ km ³ of water that comprises 97% of all water on Earth (Reid, 2016).

Temporal scale of the ocean

Ocean ecosystems have dynamics that work at vastly different timescales from millions of years to daily cycles. For example, every day the largest migration on Earth occurs as gelatinous zooplankton, crustaceans, cephalopods, and fish rise to the ocean surface to feed, and then sink back to the deep ocean, transporting organic material through the water column and contributing to carbon cycling and storage in the ocean.

In comparison, it is estimated that it takes up to 1,000 years for any 1 m ³ of water to complete its journey through the thermohaline cycle (Bigg et al., 2003) transporting cold waters from the poles to the tropics and warm waters from the equator to the poles, a process that is essential in regulating Earth's temperature. It takes millions of years to form polymetallic nodules, now targeted for mining, in the abyss. Some of the changes occurring today will be impossible to reverse in human timescales; for example, those now being seen in changes to ocean circulation.

ROLE OF THE OCEAN

Oxygen

Oxygen is fundamental to life on Earth, and the ocean plays a vital role its production. Some 40-50% of the oxygen in our atmosphere was produced in the past by the ocean; thus, it is true to say that every second breath taken has come from the ocean.

Change

Recent research suggests the ocean is losing oxygen at an unprecedented rate; the overall level of oxygen in the ocean has decreased by approximately 2% since 1960 (Schmidtko, Stramma & Visbeck, 2017; Laffoley & Baxter, 2019). Some areas have lost much more oxygen over the few decades (up to 40%), but even very small declines can be catastrophic when oxygen availability is already low (Breitburg et al., 2018; Levin, 2018). A further decline in dissolved oxygen of between 1% and 7% is predicted by the end of the century, caused by a combination of reduced oxygen solubility and reduced mixing of deep waters (Laffoley & Baxter, 2019). Oxygen becomes less soluble at warmer water temperatures, which means that, as sea temperatures increase, dissolved oxygen content in the ocean decreases (Keeling, Körtzinger & Gruber, 2010; Gao et al., 2019).

Biological pump, carbon cycle, and storage

The oceanic biological pump is a key mechanism for removing CO ₂ from the atmosphere and involves a complex suite of processes that absorb CO ₂ from the atmosphere and then transfer it as carbon from the surface of the ocean to its depths (Honjo et al., 2014). During oceanic cycling of carbon, photosynthesis by marine plants and phytoplankton removes CO ₂ from surface waters and produces oxygen as a by‐product. Over 50% of global photosynthetic carbon fixation is undertaken by marine photosynthetic organisms (Falkowski & Raven, 2013).

Marine organisms that use CO ₂ to build calcium carbonate skeletons and structures-such as shellfish, coral, and some phytoplankton-also form a major component of the biological pump. Some key functional groups include phytoplankton such as coccolithophores and diatoms, which build calcareous or siliceous shells respectively (Rost & Riebesell, 2004). When these organisms die, they sink downwards to the seabed ballasted by their shells, where the organic carbon becomes buried at depth in marine sediments and is stored for millions of years (Ducklow, Steinberg & Buesseler, 2015). Zooplankton also play a vital role in the biological pump by feeding on phytoplankton and producing sinking faecal pellets. The diel (24 hr) migration of some species of zooplankton and micronekton between shallower and deeper ocean waters also contributes to the active transport of carbon; as these organisms migrate through the water column, they influence the pattern and magnitude of fluctuations of carbon (Ducklow, Steinberg & Buesseler, 2015). Through the removal of carbon from surface waters and the subsequent transport to the deep sea, the biological pump increases the capacity of the ocean to act as a sink for atmospheric CO ₂ (The Royal Society, 2005; Reid et al., 2009).

The deep sea of greater than 200 m depth occupies approximately 60% of the Earth's surface and plays a major role in carbon cycling; below 2,000 m it contributes to long‐term biological carbon storage and burial in the biosphere (Arístegui et al., 2009; Smith et al., 2009). When organic material settles on the deep‐sea floor it is becomes buried in ocean sediments by a series of biogeochemical processes (Wenzhöfer et al., 2001), thus removing the carbon from the atmosphere on geological timescales, which span thousands to millions of years (Thurber et al., 2014).

The sheer size of the ocean's carbon reserves and the high rate of uptake make the ocean a vital component in regulating excess CO ₂ in our atmosphere, and thus mitigating climate breakdown. The ocean is our planet's largest store of carbon (Lal, 2008), removing over 1 × 10 ⁶ tons of human‐made CO ₂ from the atmosphere every hour (Sabine et al., 2004) and having absorbed 28% of all human‐made CO ₂ emissions since 1750 (Gattuso et al., 2015).

Change

Without human interference, the natural flow of carbon between the sinks (oceanic, soil, and vegetation) would be roughly stable; however, disruption to the strength of the biological pump has significant consequences for the carbon sequestration capacity of the ocean, and therefore the amount of CO ₂ removed from the atmosphere (The Royal Society, 2005). Climate‐induced impacts, including ocean acidification, rising sea surface temperatures, and changes in light and nutrient availability, will affect the structure and composition of marine ecosystems, resulting in a knock‐on effect on the natural function of the biological pump (Rost & Riebesell, 2004).

Water

Fresh water is crucial to humankind, and the vast majority (97%) is cycled through the ocean.

It is the source of 86% of global evaporation, and 78% of all rain on Earth falls on the ocean (Baumgartner & Reichel, 1975), and these processes are fundamental components of the global water cycle (Yu, 2011). Evaporated moisture from the surface of the ocean is transported to land, where it falls as rain and is eventually returned to the ocean by rivers, groundwater flow, and the melting and discharge from glaciers and ice sheets, completing the water cycle (IPCC, 2019). Evaporation and precipitation govern the loss and gain of fresh water respectively, and the balance between these two processes determines the surface salinity of the ocean (Schmitt, 2008). Salinity, in turn, plays a key role in thermohaline circulation, as it influences water density; combined with water temperature, this leads to the sinking of cold, dense seawater near the poles, driving the global conveyor belt.

Change

As a result of increases in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, a 16-24% intensification of the global water cycle is predicted to occur in a 2-3°C warmer world (Durack, Wijffels & Matear, 2012). This change is already occurring and is causing fresh‐water regions to become fresher and salty regions to become saltier (Durack, Wijffels & Matear, 2012). The changes brought about by the intensification of the global water cycle and the corresponding redistribution of rainfall will have widespread impacts on ecosystems and societies (Durack, Wijffels & Matear, 2012), including changes in water quality and availability, food security, health and sanitation, and biodiversity (Grover, 2015). Increased rainfall also reduces the salinity, and therefore density, of ocean surface waters. This, combined with human‐induced warming, causes a weakening of thermohaline circulation, a key element of the global climate system (Marotzke, 2000). A significant reduction in the strength of the thermohaline cycle would lead to cooling in the North Atlantic, with northern and western Europe particularly affected (Link & Tol, 2004).

Nutrients

Nutrients are essential for the growth and health of all plants, including phytoplankton; and in locations where necessary nutrients are limited, the ability of a plant to photosynthesize can be reduced. Phosphorus, nitrogen, iron, and silica are present in the ocean in small quantities, and these nutrients can affect the rate of primary productivity, and ultimately the capacity of the ocean to sequester CO ₂ from the atmosphere (Falkowski, Barber & Smetacek, 1998; Bristow et al., 2017). Although these nutrients are supplied from external sources, namely atmospheric deposition and riverine input, the main source during photosynthesis is the recycling of nutrients through decomposition and deep water upwellings; approximately 80% of primary productivity in surface waters is supported through nitrogen recycling (Bristow et al., 2017).

Change

The enrichment of surface waters with nutrients from human development causes eutrophication, which contributes to oxygen depletion in the ocean (Breitburg et al., 2018) and can lead to deoxygenation and hypoxia, causing deterioration of water quality (Chislock et al., 2013). Increasing concentrations of nitrogen oxide, nitrous oxides, and ammonia have been released into the atmosphere as a result of industrial activity, leading to increased nitrogen deposition in the ocean. These additional inputs of nitrogen have changed the ratio of phosphorus to nitrogen in some regions, particularly the North Pacific, causing disruption to open ocean nutrient cycles, especially in nutrient‐limited areas (Kim et al., 2014; Ren et al., 2017). Ocean warming and increased stratification are also altering nutrient availability and, as a result, primary productivity, particularly in low‐latitude upwelling regions (Bindoff et al., 2019).

Weather

The ocean regulates global weather and climate through the storage and transport of heat around the planet, via the conveyor belt‐like system known as thermohaline circulation, in which deep ocean currents transport cold waters from the poles to the tropics and warm waters from the equator to the poles. As warmer waters evaporate, the temperature and humidity of the surrounding air increases, forming storms and clouds that are carried around the Earth by prevailing winds, known as trade winds. These trade winds are part of a complex global wind system that drives surface ocean‐circling currents called gyres, which transfer heat from the tropics to the polar regions. The ocean also causes the formation of tropical cyclones, known as hurricanes or typhoons depending on the region in which they occur. These intense storm systems form almost exclusively over areas of tropical ocean where sea surface temperatures exceed 26°C (Trenberth et al., 2018). A resulting rise of warm air generates changes in air pressure and the formation of clouds to force the high and damaging winds of these storms.

Change

The warming of the ocean as a result of climate breakdown now being observed is already contributing to an increase in the intensity and duration of extreme weather events, such as tropical cyclones, flooding, heatwaves, and droughts (Trenberth et al., 2018). A recent study found that an intensification of sea surface winds since the 1990s, likely caused by changes in atmospheric circulation as a result of greenhouse gas warming, has resulted in a speeding up of ocean currents, equivalent to a 15% increase per decade in the energy of currents (Hu et al., 2020). This acceleration could have effects that will be felt around the planet, with changes to ocean heat storage, CO ₂ uptake, and weather patterns (Voozen, 2020).

Climate‐induced changes to the intensity and spatial distribution of rainfall, if substantial, pose one of the greatest risks associated with climate change (Wentz et al., 2007). It is anticipated that for every degree Celsius of warming in the Earth's lower atmosphere there will be a 7% increase in the atmospheric moisture content as a result of the ability of warmer air to hold more water vapour (Schmitt, 2008). This will cause an intensification of existing patterns of ocean evaporation and precipitation, leading to extreme weather events such as floods and droughts, with wet regions becoming wetter and dry regions becoming drier in response to global warming (Durack et al., 2012).

Climate

Change

If the amount of thermal energy entering the ocean is greater than the thermal energy leaving, the average temperature will increase (Faizal & Ahmed, 2011). This change is already seen to be happening, as in the past 50 years the ocean has absorbed 93% of the excess heat generated by greenhouse gas emissions (Levitus et al., 2012). The average global sea surface temperature has increased by approximately 0.11°C every decade since the 1970s and by an estimated 1°C since the Industrial Revolution (IPCC, 2019).

Because the ocean plays such a critical role in regulating Earth's climate, a rise in sea temperature will also result in potentially significant changes to the climate system.

Early View
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Abstract

1. The ocean is the linchpin supporting life on Earth, but it is in declining health due to an increasing footprint of human use and climate change. Despite notable successes in helping to protect the ocean, the scale of actions is simply not now meeting the overriding scale and nature of the ocean's problems that confront us.

2. Moving into a post‐COVID‐19 world, new policy decisions will need to be made. Some, especially those developed prior to the pandemic, will require changes to their trajectories; others will emerge as a response to this global event. Reconnecting with nature, and specifically with the ocean, will take more than good intent and wishful thinking. Words, and how we express our connection to the ocean, clearly matter now more than ever before.

3. The evolution of the ocean narrative, aimed at preserving and expanding options and opportunities for future generations and a healthier planet, is articulated around six themes: (1) all life is dependent on the ocean; (2) by harming the ocean, we harm ourselves; (3) by protecting the ocean, we protect ourselves; (4) humans, the ocean, biodiversity, and climate are inextricably linked; (5) ocean and climate action must be undertaken together; and (6) reversing ocean change needs action now.

4. This narrative adopts a 'One Health' approach to protecting the ocean, addressing the whole Earth ocean system for better and more equitable social, cultural, economic, and environmental outcomes at its core. Speaking with one voice through a narrative that captures the latest science, concerns, and linkages to humanity is a precondition to action, by elevating humankind's understanding of our relationship with 'planet Ocean' and why it needs to become a central theme to everyone's lives. We have only one ocean, we must protect it, now. There is no 'Ocean B'.

1 INTRODUCTION

When the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was asked what made his job difficult, he is alleged to have replied 'Events, dear boy, events'. As it is with politics, so it is with the world. Rare though they are, some events shape the way everyone sees, relates to, and responds to the world around them. The COVID‐19 pandemic is one of those events. It has altered the way much of the global population thinks, lives, and behaves. The pandemic has been a violent rupture of our experience of normality, and for many it has led to profound suffering and loss, and at the same time directly or indirectly affecting the lives of ocean‐dependent coastal communities (Bennett et al., 2020). Though the outbreak of the virus has caused huge global disruption of social and economic activity and either the cancellation or postponement of key ocean protection events, it has shown that large‐scale urgent change is possible, but not without challenges (Bavel et al., 2020).

Some of the changes that have happened as a result of COVID‐19, at least in the short term, have been positive for the environment, such as the rapid decrease in atmospheric pollutants (and associated deaths) arising from decreased transportation, cleaner beaches, and reduced environmental noise levels (Chen et al., 2020; Zambrano‐Monserrate, Ruano & Sanchez‐Alcade, 2020). On the negative side, however, many have been very damaging for the ocean, such as the increase in generation of plastic waste, a decrease in waste recycling (Klemeš et al., 2020; Zambrano‐Monserrate, Ruano & Sanchez‐Alcade, 2020), major disruptions to the blue economy, and significant impacts worldwide on the management of protected areas due to a lack of tourist funding, amongst other issues (Hockings et al., 2020).

During the recovery phase of COVID‐19, the challenge will be how to sustain a green recovery and effectively communicate the need to address other crises, such as the climate emergency and the rapidly degrading ocean, and to manage the pressure for rapid economic recovery by directing it at a more sustainable path (Rosenbloom & Markard, 2020). As we move into a post‐COVID‐19 world, new policy decisions will need to be made. Some, especially those that were being developed prior to the pandemic, will require changes to their trajectories; others will emerge as a response to this global event. For ocean conservation, this is an opportunity to set out what should follow.

There is a growing general sentiment that what went before is not what should continue as world economies reboot and the global population re‐emerges from their nationally imposed lockdowns. An example of this is the EU's Green Deal (EU, 2019), which has now been supplemented by a Green Recovery Plan (EU, 2020). However, at the same time, there is evidence that some governments have used COVID‐19 as an opportunity to roll back environmental legislation (e.g. Tollefson, 2020). A change of paradigm is needed to help develop new social norms that will in turn create new incentives for governments, the private sector, and individuals to practise more sustainable behaviour (Claudet et al., 2020a). This paper is therefore not, as such, directly about COVID‐19, but it is about what that paradigm means and what needs to follow the global pandemic. The narrative it proposes to connect, inspire, and act for the ocean is a contribution to the green recovery process that many are now focused on seeing happen (e.g. Bleischwitz, 2020).

By exploring the issues from an ocean perspective that have led us to this precarious position with nature and the planet in the first place, this paper sets out an evolution of the narrative to put the ocean centre stage in such recovery processes. As the author and entrepreneur Mohith Agadi once said, 'Environment is no one's property to destroy; it's everyone's responsibility to protect'. We hope that this paper will therefore be a valuable information source to policy advisers and decision‐makers and for all engaged stakeholders, including civil society, as we inch slowly towards a post‐COVID‐19 world, where we all need to try harder to live much more in harmony with nature than we did before the pandemic took hold.

2 APPRECIATING OCEAN VALUES, AND WHY WORDS MATTER

Set starkly against this lack of awareness is the fact that the ocean's vast size means it has a major influence on the functioning of the entire planet (Steffen et al., 2020). The ocean provides benefits that can be individually seen, tasted, and experienced. Seafood and aquaculture from the ocean are critical for global food security, as they provide around 20% of the animal protein and 6.7% of all protein consumed worldwide (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2018; Costello et al., 2019). Diverse cultures, societies, and knowledge bases are integrally linked to marine and coastal biodiversity and the social-ecological systems they support. For example, communities and infrastructure benefit through mangroves, seagrasses, and saltmarshes that provide coastal protection from storms and erosion. There is also increasing evidence that humans can derive increased fitness and mental health because of proximity to the ocean (Fleming et al., 2014; Fleming et al., 2019).

In the context of COVID‐19 and human health more generally, the diversity of ocean life also provides a genetic storehouse of adaptive potential in the face of a changing climate (Blasiak et al., 2020). It is the source of new pharmaceutical products, which have been discovered at rates of up to 2.5 times the industry average (Blasiak et al., 2020). To date, over 34,000 marine natural products have been discovered (MarinLit, 2020), holding great potential to improve human life and health. Some hold high potential to provide cures (Sagar, Kaur & Minneman, 2010; Gentile et al., 2020), such as the sponge, Aplysina, which when damaged produces chemicals known as bromotyrosines (Binnewerg et al., 2020). Bromotyrosines are responsible for the antiviral, antibacterial, and antiparasitic properties of the sponge. Of more recent relevance regarding COVID‐19 are the unusual nucleoside properties of sponges (nucleosides are best known as the four building blocks of DNA). Unlike DNA, a sponge can fill its body with just a single nucleoside, which has been found to be powerful in halting viral infections by mimicking DNA to trick the virus. Single sponge nucleosides cannot be linked in a complex intertwined chain like human DNA, and so, as the viral body tries to replicate, the single nucleosides will not react in the expected manner and DNA construction is terminated (Bergmann & Feeney, 1951; Hall, 2019). Antiviral drugs have since been developed that harness the mimicking qualities of nucleosides, and one of these, Remdesivir, is on trial as a treatment for COVID‐19 (Seley‐Radtke & Yates, 2018; Eastman et al., 2020; Seley‐Radtke, 2020).

Action must be taken to heed the warning signs before it becomes too late. Earth's history shows that if the ocean rapidly or appreciably departs from the status quo sustained through feedback and self‐regulatory processes over hundreds or thousands of years (exemplified by changes in temperature, acidity, and oxygen), such major environmental perturbations have always resulted in incredibly challenging times for life on Earth, often leading to mass extinctions (Barnosky et al., 2011), such as the Permian mass extinction (the Great Dying) that saw ~90% of all marine taxa go extinct (Payne & Clapham, 2012; Burger, Estrada & Gustin, 2019; Shen et al., 2019). There are real and mounting dangers that we may win battles but ultimately lose the war on decline and degradation of the ocean by simply not using the right narratives to connect us to the importance of the ocean, the realities of a post‐COVID world, and the need to alter our course (Lubchenco & Gaines, 2019; Claudet et al., 2020a).

3 WHY A BETTER, MORE PRECISE, AND UPDATED OCEAN NARRATIVE IS NEEDED

To succeed post‐COVID‐19 in a collective vision of a healthy, thriving, and more effectively managed and protected ocean, we need to further evolve the ocean narrative (Lubchenco & Gaines, 2019). Unfortunately, most of the world's population lacks a basic understanding of our total dependence on the systems that sustain us and all other life on Earth. Reconnecting with nature, therefore, and specifically with the ocean which is the lifeblood of planet Earth, will take more than good intent and wishful thinking. Put simply, people do not understand how deeply 'embedded' we all are in the systems that sustain life on Earth, how those systems exert a huge influence on human well‐being, and how humans now, in turn, exert such a huge influence on the functioning and viability of such an Earth system.

Beneath the surface, there have been notable conservation successes (e.g. Duarte et al., 2020; Knowlton, 2020), but overall, despite the grand pronouncements, it is fair to say we continue to increase extraction of resources and add more pollutants, discounting the damage to the ocean as minor problems or acceptable losses, against perceived 'essential' exploitative gain. The growing global population is increasingly used by sectors, such as fisheries, as justification of ever greater levels of exploitation at the clear sacrifice of nature (Steneck & Pauly, 2019). These attempts are increasingly 'dressed up' by affiliating them to the conservation flag. This behaviour is self‐destructive. Cutting through the rhetoric and realizing that we are continuing on the same path with no reprieve for the ocean from the pressures of exploitation and climate breakdown and expecting a different-more positive outcome-was used by Einstein as the definition of madness.

Whilst some inroads have been made in policy dialogues over the last decades to link human well‐being to a stable climate in an attempt to control our carbon emissions (not entirely successfully; Stoknes, 2015), the same cannot be said about connecting human well‐being with the health of the ocean. We use 'our' in this paper in respect of the ocean and planet simply to point out that it is humankind's responsibility to sort out the problems that we have created. This is to allow the ocean to contribute maximally to human well‐being by restoring it to full health, and in so doing to take the opportunity to do better for ourselves, the ocean, and the planet.

Words, and how we express our connection to the ocean, clearly matter now more than ever before. We must acknowledge the importance of the ocean and reset and reframe the discussion in the face of direct human impacts, such as overfishing and habitat destruction, as well as climate disruption. Reflections from the experience of COVID‐19 show us the discussion needs to be substantive and focused. The global community faces a decision point: relaxing back into the status quo of life before the pandemic, beset with all its problems and issues, or building a green (blue) recovery to support economies within the context of a healthier planet. It is clear the latter has significant advantages to human well‐being and the environment.

There is the opportunity to create a new, promising and more equitable future, where humanity can realize its full potential over the long term by utilizing nature‐based solutions much more, and living in greater harmony with nature. There is also an urgent need to transform the ocean narrative and how it connects to people, policies, and priorities, as science now clearly shows the ocean is integral to the Earth system (Steffen et al., 2020). Humans are part of one unified Earth system (Schellnhuber, 1999), and through that realization it is clear the ocean is central to human well‐being (and vice versa). The current narrative, however, does not connect people with actions in the way that is needed; if it did, we would have made more progress by now. This statement applies equally to the global climate crisis.

Experience has shown the importance of getting the narrative right, and the ocean conservation community itself has a key role, first and foremost, in delivering consistent facts through the diversity of communication routes at its disposal. If we are inconsistent, then others will be too. Some may even exploit such weaknesses in approach to justify their own ends, which usually relates to sustaining the status quo or increasing exploitation and exploration pressures on an already fragile, damaged ocean system. We already know-for example, from the works of Aristotle and Copernicus in ancient human history, to the impressive modern technology displayed by the USA, Russia, China, and other space‐faring nations in more recent times-that we live on a blue planet with water covering 71% of its surface. The ocean efficiently absorbs infrared, red, and other wavelengths of light from the sun that penetrate its surface, leaving only blue to be reflected into space. In an effort to satisfy the human psyche's quest for order, hydrographers have overlain wholly artificial hydrographic boundaries to create the defined spaces of the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Arctic Oceans (International Hydrographic Organization, 1986), with the fifth basin, the Southern Ocean, even now still not recognized by all countries. Look more closely and there is only one ocean (Figure 1).

The ocean is an immense interconnected and heterogeneous whole that provides immeasurable benefits to humanity and the planet. It is modulated by a range of physical oceanographic processes, as well as by wind, solar heating, and precipitation. These processes include the thermohaline circulation system on a large scale and more localized coastal currents that are influenced by geomorphology, weather, and tidal conditions. The ocean also comprises a vast array of seabed and water column habitats, each home to different communities of animals, plants, algae, and micro‐organisms. Some habitats are connected through their use by marine species at different stages of their life cycle; for example, reef fish that use coral reefs as adults and mangroves as juveniles, or seafloor animals whose early life stages (larvae) reside in surface waters (e.g. Nagelkerken et al., 2002; Cowan & Sponaugle, 2009; Nagelkerken et al., 2017). This variation across local to large scales increases the resilience of the ocean, and the need to transcend jurisdictional boundaries is an important consideration in the application of area‐based management tools.

The political behaviour of governments over the past decades shows that referring to the 'basins' as 'oceans' makes it justifiable to apply different management standards in different regions (e.g. with different regional fisheries management bodies; Pretlove & Blasiak, 2018). The Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has long campaigned for the need to use the singular form 'ocean' rather than the commonly used plural 'oceans'. More recently, campaigning to drop the 's' from ocean 1 has been seen as a further step towards improving 'ocean literacy' amongst policymakers, the media, teachers, the public, and scientists. This has helped recognize the importance of the ocean to the health of the planet and humanity and helped strengthen marine governance for the benefit of present and future generations. 2 We refer to the atmosphere in the singular, and so we should do the same and refer to the ocean in the same way. It is very unfortunate, therefore, that key individuals and organizations leading ocean conservation efforts, scientists, and donors supporting the ocean community so consistently get this wrong and keep still referring to 'oceans'. The wording matters, especially if we wish to drive protection and management forward with a single voice and in a more consistent way. World Oceans Day should more correctly and impactfully be referred to as World Ocean Day. The ocean conservation community must shoulder more responsibility to get the narrative right: we have only one ocean, we must protect it, there is no 'Ocean B'.

Another narrative issue that the ocean community has a prominent role in correcting relates to statements about 'managing the ocean'. No! The ocean cannot be directly 'managed', but our activities can be managed, and in this way reduce impacts on the ocean. Similarly, precision is lacking in other related areas. The new target of 'at least 30%' as a global target for coverage of the ocean by fully or highly protected MPAs (Horta e Costa et al., 2016)-the level of protection that will most benefit biodiversity (Zupan et al., 2018a)-is clearly and specifically worded, yet time and time again the ocean conservation community refers to the target as '30%'. The phrase 'at least 30%' is a direction, whereas '30%' is a definitive destination.

There is a scientific reason for using 'at least'; this refers to at least 30% of representative ecosystems; and because these ecosystems are differently distributed, this results in a need for more than 30% of the ocean area to be protected (O'Leary et al., 2019). Also, because knowledge and analytical powers are increasing year on year and it takes years for the global conservation community to agree on things, we now know that stating exactly '30%' is already outdated. The target was developed and agreed at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Parks Congress in Sydney, Australia, in 2014, and since then much more is known about the scale and nature of the impacts and challenges that we face. In fact, the latest scientific analysis shows that at least 30% is now the barest minimum needed to properly protect the ocean (Woodley et al., 2019). Besides, this percentage only accounts for present threats on the ocean, whereas they are increasing at an unprecedented pace (Jouffray et al., 2020).

It is also important to specify that the 'at least 30%' target is for fully or highly protected MPAs (Horta e Costa et al., 2016). Experience has already demonstrated that a high proportion of existing MPAs lack management plans (Rogers et al., 2020), are often weakly enforced (Edgar et al., 2014; Gill et al., 2017), or permit activities that damage biodiversity (Dureuil et al., 2018; Zupan et al., 2018b).

In taking forward a fit‐for‐purpose ocean narrative, it is critically important that the differences between these two discussion threads are recognized and understood (i.e. the amount of ocean we actually need to protect versus the lesser amount of ocean nations feel they can protect), otherwise current political pressures and sectoral interests will deprive the world of the opportunity to state goals for sustainable development and the actual level of action needed for a better tomorrow. There is a clear choice here between the debate and decisions being led by what people 'think they can do', rather than what all the science and evidence says we 'must do' now. Future generations looking back at our pandemic‐compromised world with an ocean full of warning signs may characterize the former as 'reckless and self‐centred' and the latter as 'wise and enlightened' leadership. This issue of consistency and accuracy in the ocean narrative, therefore, is not just about particular phrases, but also about how the ocean community ensures they are founded in science. They need to be based on facts and experience, so the overall approach to ocean conservation holds together, makes sense, and has the right degree of ambition.

Alongside direct, often local, management issues, such as overfishing, pollution, and habitat destruction, a new range of global climate‐related drivers are significantly increasing pressure on the ocean. In the last 15 years, six major areas of concern have been documented in the scientific literature, which are now widely recognized as issues of global concern (e.g. Intergovernmental Science‐Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), 2019; see Appendix 1 for details):

Significant and accelerating heating of the ocean and associated oxygen loss (Laffoley & Baxter, 2016; Laffoley & Baxter, 2019).

Significant sea‐level rise and linked loss of coastal natural protection (Li et al., 2020).

Significant regional acidification with a worsening trend (Ono et al., 2019; Terhaar, Kwiatowski & Bopp, 2020)

Significant alterations to wind regimes and perturbations to major ocean currents and upwelling systems, which shape ocean ecosystems and human societies (Hu et al., 2020).

Significant changes in patterns of ocean primary production, ecosystems, and species distribution resulting from increased warming and stratification at low to mid latitudes and decline of sea ice (Lotze et al., 2019).

Significant impact on marine fisheries (Thiault et al., 2019).

These new issues are significant at the Earth/ocean system scale, and they interact with one another to greatly exacerbate the scale of concern and impacts. It is these combined issues that are driving a much greater urgency and need for ambition to recover and restore the ocean state. A clear updated ocean narrative needs to lie at the heart of such a process.

4 RESETTING THE OCEAN NARRATIVE POST‐COVID‐19

The COVID‐19 pandemic has provided an opportunity to reflect on our relationship with nature, but the overriding climate and biodiversity crises have not gone away. Emissions continue to rise, and climate impact problems continue to escalate and develop (IPCC, 2019). The same is true of serious losses of ecosystems and associated biodiversity driven by overfishing, habitat destruction, and pollution (IPBES, 2019; Rogers et al., 2020). Resetting the narrative requires better navigation of these driving forces and a need to remind ourselves of our place in the world, our links to nature, and our dependence on a healthy, functioning ocean.

If we are to reconnect the dots in an orderly manner to lead us to better actions and conclusions, a joined‐up narrative is needed to stimulate integrated action. Politically, the world agreed to look at linking climate and biodiversity in 2014 at COP21 in Paris, but there has been limited progress to put such words into practice. Notably, the decision text at COP25 in 2019 recognizes the ocean as an 'integral part of the Earth's climate system', highlights the need to ensure 'the integrity of ocean and coastal ecosystems', and requests the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, a United Nations (UN) climate change advisory group, to open a dialogue on the ocean and climate. The 44 submissions to the UN addressing content and format of this dialogue make clear the urgency of implementing the Paris commitments, informed by a clear ocean narrative.

Through a workshop held in London, but conducted mainly virtually, the International Programme on the State of the Ocean drew together leading marine scientists to pose them this very challenge. Their response was to create a six‐point post‐COVID‐19 narrative (Table 1) together with a list of the fundamental services the ocean provides to humankind (Appendix 1) and the case for urgent action ( Supporting Information Data S1).

4.1 Narrative themes

4.1.1 All life is dependent on the ocean

Nurturing the ocean is essential to safeguard our future as it provides valuable and vital ecosystem services, such as oxygen production and climate regulation, as well as food, energy, mineral, genetic, and cultural and recreational services (Figure 2; Barbier, 2017). Coastal communities and economies are reliant on these services for their sustenance and persistence, which have also been challenged by the COVID‐19 pandemic. The provision of these services and access to appropriately managed resources are critical to accomplishing the sustainable development goals adopted by all member states of the UN to eliminate poverty and promote sustainable development (Singh et al., 2018; Claudet et al., 2020a). Our survival is accordingly dependent on a healthy ocean, but from afar it may seem to some more akin to a parasitic relationship, where resources are being extracted well beyond safe, sustainable levels, with little thought for ocean health or for the plight of future generations. If we are alert to the problems, we often simply shift our baselines (Pauly, 1995; Jackson et al., 2001), forgetting how the ocean was and instead use more recent data on partly depleted resources to justify our actions.

4.1.2 By harming the ocean, we harm ourselves

We have ample scientific data that confirm certain large‐scale human activities are damaging to the current and future state and condition of the ocean, from which humankind derives the very benefits we value, and yet there is little action to cease these practices. Out of sight and out of mind can no longer be the excuse when marine species, habitats, and ecosystem structure and functions are being impacted and lost. In some cases, such as unsustainable fisheries, activities are even subsidised with taxpayers' money (Sumaila et al., 2016). Although there is a process of environmental impact assessments in place in most nations, they have not been effective in many cases, in part because of stakeholder manipulation (Enríquez‐de‐Salamanca, 2018).

Intertidal and subtidal habitats are closest to human populations and, therefore, have arguably been most impacted by anthropogenic activities. For example, global mangrove cover decreased by 0.2-0.7% annually between 2000 and 2012, with some countries suffering significantly greater decreases (Hamilton & Casey, 2016); coastal development is a primary cause of this decline. These activities have many impacts on ecosystems, including direct (e.g. building on habitats) and indirect impacts (e.g. increased erosion and sedimentation from land clearance and forestry that increases water turbidity), alongside the loss of appreciable carbon storage that such ecosystems provide.

Coral reefs have been estimated to reduce damage to terrestrial assets by US$4 billion annually through coastal protection (Beck et al., 2018). Yet, these very same coral‐reef ecosystems are predicted to be reduced to 10-30% of their area of extent with a 1.5°C increase in temperature resulting from climate disruption. If the temperature is allowed to increase by 2°C then the remaining area shrinks to just 1% (IPCC, 2019). Such a narrow window of change in environmental conditions demonstrates the linkages between climate and biodiversity, and the importance of acting quickly to mitigate climate breakdown to prevent the large‐scale transformation of a habitat already at high risk of impact from sea‐surface temperature rise (Gattuso et al., 2015). Rapid and sustained reduction in the emissions of carbon dioxide (CO ₂) and other powerful greenhouse gases, such as methane, is the only way of mitigating climate breakdown impacts on coral reefs. Other conservation, adaptation, and restoration options will progressively narrow and become more expensive to society as time progresses and as the effects of ocean warming, acidification, and deoxygenation become more intense (Gattuso et al., 2015).

Additionally, it is unconscionable that new major industrial activities go ahead despite a lack of informative data and/or mitigation considerations. For instance, it is expected that deep‐seabed mining for metals, such as cobalt and nickel, will begin within the next decade, justified on the basis of a need for renewable energy technologies, despite the potential wide‐ranging and long‐lasting impacts, including inevitable biodiversity loss (Niner et al., 2018; Jones, Amon & Chapman, 2018), with recovery on human timescales an impossibility in the abyssal ocean (Jones et al., 2017; Simon‐Lledó et al., 2019). The money required for successful deep‐seabed mining would be better invested in the development of technologies that use alternative metals and other materials, recycling of metals and rare earth elements, and forcing compliance with such measures, rather than driving more and more unsustainable extraction of finite resources (Levin, Amon & Lily, 2020).

Given the global scale of ocean challenges, many large‐scale geoengineering solutions have also been suggested: marine cloud brightening (to increase ocean reflectivity), artificial upwelling (energy and fish production), downwelling (hurricane diversion), mineralization of CO ₂ in rock under the sea floor (carbon storage), and adding carbonate minerals to the ocean (to enhance alkalinity). Several assessments, however, have identified significant risks associated with such projects, so any possible geoengineering solutions to climate disruption require a lot more investigation (Shepherd, 2012; Hoegh‐Guldberg et al., 2019). In any such endeavours, the precautionary principle is the only sensible approach when considering future activities.

4.1.3 By protecting the ocean, we protect ourselves

In the past, obtaining provisions from the ocean was too easily taken for granted; the ocean seemed 'too big to fail' until it became increasingly clear that human impacts were, and are, threatening the ocean's functionality and capacity to provide these services (Lubchenco & Gaines, 2019). These issues are now too large to ignore. It is abundantly clear that we protect ourselves by protecting the ocean.

If we are to protect ourselves and the many services the ocean provides, it is critical that a clear accounting of MPAs and other forms of effective area‐based conservation measures is carried out as we work towards achieving more appropriate targets. In addition, an adequate level of protection needs to be implemented and effectively managed; MPAs need to be climate smart and resilient in the face of global change (Tittensor et al., 2019).

Though we have stressed the importance of spatial conservation measures here, it is important to emphasize that this does not mean the rest of the ocean is left to business‐as‐usual exploitation. For example, marine reserves in themselves do not necessarily reduce overfishing and may even displace fishing activity to areas where it has previously been low (e.g. Kaiser, 2005; Agardy, Notarbartolo di Sciara & Christie, 2011). They also provide little protection from issues such as long‐range pollutants or invasive species (Agardy et al., 2011; Burfeind et al., 2013). It is therefore of great importance to manage the entire ocean for all activities so that they are sustainable and maximize ocean and human health (Rogers et al., 2020).

4.1.4 Humans, the ocean, biodiversity, and climate are inextricably linked

The ocean forms a critical part of the Earth's life‐support system through its modulation of climate (Figure 3; Stocker, 2015). It also directly controls the habitability of the coastal zone, the provision of food, recreation, livelihoods, transport of goods (shipping), and information (internet cables) (Bindoff et al., 2019). The ocean, from the surface to its greatest depths, is a vast reservoir of heat. Water can hold approximately 4,000 times as much heat as air. By taking up 93% of the excess heat from global warming (Levitus et al., 2012; Reid, 2016), and by absorbing more than a quarter of the excess CO ₂ associated with anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions over the past half century (Laffoley & Baxter, 2019), the ocean has protected the planet from more extreme heating (Houghton, 2007; McKinley et al., 2017). The ocean is also the largest body of water on Earth, controlling the water cycle by regulating evaporation, rainfall, terrestrial runoff, and sea ice formation. These, in turn, influence ocean circulation, which modulates the ocean carbon, heat, and salt budgets.

But this overwhelming influence comes with a cost for ocean ecosystems, and for people (Pörtner et al., 2014; Bindoff et al., 2019). The ocean has buffered climate breakdown over the last century by absorbing ever greater amounts of heat and carbon, but there are indications that the role it has played until now is changing. Both the rate of warming (Cheng et al., 2019) and the global mean circulation that transports heat by currents towards the poles from warm equatorial regions has accelerated (Hu et al., 2020). Based on the work of Cheng and colleagues, it is estimated that the ocean is warming up to 40% faster than was estimated by the IPCC ( 2013) report. The two main sinks (ocean and land) for greenhouse gas CO ₂, which are the major pathways for lowering concentrations in the atmosphere, appear also to be declining in their ability to do this at a fast rate, 0.54% per annum (Bennedsen, Hillebrand & Koopman, 2019). When combined, these two factors mean that climate disruption, as represented by a changing ocean, is possibly happening at a much faster rate than climate models have been predicting.

The solution to the aforementioned issues is to first recognize the essential values that the ocean provides for all life on Earth and then, in joined‐up actions across all sectors of society, to strengthen existing and discover new solutions to overcome the challenges everyone now faces. Some are straightforward, such as taking the pressures off the system to enable the ocean to recover and become healthier into the future. This should be a multi‐pronged strategy, combining drastic cuts in anthropogenic emissions of CO ₂ and other potent greenhouse gases with dramatic scaling‐up of full and effective protection for ecosystems in the ocean, better provisions to protect mobile species, and a return to recognizable, demonstrable, and accountable sustainability for all activities conducted anywhere in the ocean.

Other strategies across society to join up actions will need to be stronger and more inventive. They will need to include more help to protect wide‐ranging marine species whose conservation is dependent on wider measures rather than just MPAs, as well as new innovative private-public partnerships. An example of this is the rapidly growing cuboid satellite industry and all the new technology they have to observe the Earth and ocean in hitherto unimaginable detail, and thus revolutionize surveillance and monitoring capabilities, and the prosecution of those individuals and nations who undermine everyone else's efforts to do the right thing and protect the ocean.

4.1.5 Ocean and climate action must be undertaken together

Humans reside at the heart of the climate problem and must wholeheartedly embrace the ocean as part of the climate solution. Feedbacks from human influence on ocean temperature may reinforce and exacerbate global warming. Solutions to these problems must be ambitious and wide‐reaching. Protecting the ocean will require more than achieving the Paris Agreement greenhouse gas emission targets. Even if they are achieved, some parts of the ocean and dependent people in coastal cities and regions and small island states will still suffer (IPCC, 2018; Laffoley & Baxter, 2018).

The Paris Agreement only considers national emissions. It does not include, for example, aircraft and shipping emissions, which in the case of the pre‐COVID‐19UK, for example, added a further 57% on top of the current national emissions (Committee on Climate Change, 2019). Given the importance, and until very recently unrecognized key role, that the ocean plays in mitigating climate breakdown, much greater resources need to be allocated to understanding the ocean and its climate role so that humanity is in a better position to predict and adapt to the speed and scale of change in the future. This applies to addressing potential changes in the ocean that may initiate tipping points/regime shifts in global climate (e.g. Lenton, 2020). Short of yet‐to‐be developed innovations and geoengineering solutions, achieving the required reduction in carbon emissions will require dramatic changes in current approaches to ensure a habitable world for future generations. Though such benefits may not be immediately obvious, they are essential as they will ultimately lead to cleaner air, less acidic water, and so on. This new narrative is therefore formulated and focused on the opportunity for humanity to live within its means and to achieve its full potential in that context, both now and in the future, whilst preventing our current actions from reducing our future potential or even destroying it. Most people's actions are driven by personal gain, not community or future community gain. Yet time is not on our side to address these shortcomings, as the decadal timescale to effect changes such as these is rapidly reducing with little sign of the serious at‐scale responses that will be required from governments.

Direct ocean‐based mitigation actions include increasing the generation of renewable energy (solar and wind) from the ocean, the greening of ocean industries (to achieve carbon neutrality), and enhancement of the natural carbon sequestration capabilities of blue carbon ecosystems through expansion and restoration of coastal mangroves, seagrasses, and saltmarshes, and carbon storage in seabed sediments and biogenic reefs. Hoegh‐Guldberg et al. ( 2019), based on the aforementioned options, plus possible sub‐seabed (geological) carbon storage, calculate that these initiatives could reduce global carbon emissions by 4 Gt of CO ₂ equivalent per annum by 2030 relative to projected business‐as‐usual emissions. During the COVID‐19 pandemic it is estimated that CO ₂ emissions fell by around 17 Mt per day, equivalent to 6.2 Gt per annum (Le Quéré et al., 2020). 'A sustainable ocean‐based economy can play an essential role in much needed emissions reduction, while providing jobs, supporting food security, sustaining biological diversity and enhancing resilience' (Hoegh‐Guldberg et al., 2019).

However, societal adaptation can and must go further to build ocean resilience to climate stress. From spatial planning and the designation of MPAs to improved fishing and aquaculture practices, new ocean science and ecosystem‐based management, climate consideration must become integral to how we study, perceive, protect, and use the ocean. The benefits will accrue to the ocean economy (Gaines et al., 2019), to the whole of society, and to the health of the planet (Gattuso et al., 2015).

4.1.6 Reversing ocean change needs action now

In many respects, the ocean has been treated as a frontier with open access to its resources, relatively few rules to constrain human activities, and competition to exploit its resources. This has resulted in wasteful exploitation of species, habitats, and ecosystems (Norse, 2005).

The solution to the problems leading to a degradation of marine ecosystems, the services they provide, and their predicted sustained and accelerated decline for the foreseeable future is immediate concerted global action. Such action is not unprecedented at a global scale. The discovery of the ozone hole in Antarctica in 1985 (Farman, Gardiner & Shanklin, 1985) triggered the creation of the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer and the subsequent regulation of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other halogenated ozone‐depleting substances that stimulated the opening of the hole in the first place. Evidence since then suggests that this multilateral agreement has largely succeeded, with evidence that the ozone hole is reducing in size (Banerjee et al., 2020). Vigilance is still required to ensure that CFC production does not increase again, as the expected rate of reduction has slowed, suggesting that unreported new production is occurring that is inconsistent with the protocol (Montzka et al., 2018; Dhomse et al., 2019).

In contrast to how we have dealt with CFCs, the sectoral and fragmented approach to ocean governance underlies our inability to tackle the drivers of degradation of marine ecosystems and, at a broader scale, the Earth system. Failure to recognize the connections between the state of the ocean, human health, and societal well‐being is symptomatic of an archaic view of management of resources for the benefit of a limited number of actors, such as private industry or states.

The connectivity between marine ecosystems (e.g. O'Leary & Roberts, 2016; Popova et al., 2019) means that negative impacts in one place, or on one species, habitat, or ecosystem, inevitably have broader consequences for the ocean. What has not been fully recognized is that they also impact humans at local to global scales.

5 DISCUSSION: THE URGENCY TO TRANSFORM WORDS INTO ACTIONS

The global response to the COVID‐19 pandemic is an example of a rapid and coordinated response to the emergence of a threat to human health, despite its deficiencies (Gates, 2020; Jacobsen, 2020). Preventing, detecting, and controlling such diseases has given rise to the 'One Health' concept (One Health Initiative Task Force, 2008; Annelli et al., 2011), which highlights the transdisciplinary approaches required to address a complex problem that spans humans, animals, and ecosystems (Jacobsen, 2020). The ocean narrative set out in this paper has adopted a 'One Health' approach to protecting the ocean, considering all aspects of ocean problems, including the cultural and economic drivers of degradation and recognizing the broadscale consequences on ecosystems and human health. The intent of this further evolution of the ocean narrative is to raise the ocean on the global agenda and garner the concerted global action required to change the current trajectory of biodiversity loss and decline in ecosystem services and to allow humanity to achieve its full potential (Ord, 2020).

At the core of the narrative is recognition of the need to address the whole Earth‐ocean system for better and more equitable social, cultural, economic, and environmental outcomes. Our 'legacy of inaction' combined with new climate impacts has caught up with us to create an increasingly dangerous mix of changes that threaten current and future ocean functions, values, and benefits. To move forward we need to deal once and for all with the political mismatch between acting now to invest for the future, and not the often‐encountered strategy of political short‐termism to garner re‐election. Though the latter may play out to good effect for individual politicians and their aspirations at national scales, it does little to secure the changes needed at a world scale.

Addressing the needs to respond to the ocean problems, which are now manifest at the global scale, will not only stand a better chance of halting the decline and negative changes now being seen across the whole ocean, but it also represents the best strategy to achieving success in other related areas, such as delivering a 'sustainable ocean economy'. Fundamentally, as was achieved with tackling CFCs, we need to remove the problems associated with 'mind the gap(s)' and recognize the importance of delivering joined‐up sectoral policy development and implementation. If this is not achieved, then the positive actions in one sector can easily be wiped out by other sectors ignoring the ocean warning signs and continuing with business as usual.

Such a strategy and the actions that emerge from it must be guided by recognition of and investment in baselines, which can be used to guide ambition and the creation of successful solutions. We have lost measurable and significant value and benefits from the ocean over the decades, and longer, by not recognizing the opportunities that investment in the ocean can bring, coupled with not internalizing the costs of current activities that damage the ocean, such as overfishing. As it is, such existing industries, coupled with the potential of new damaging ones like deep‐sea mining, take the profits and seldom pay for the damage and consequences of their actions to broader society, and indeed often taxpayers subsidize their endeavours to the tune of billions of pounds. As with climate change impacts, it is predominantly the poor and those least able to pay who shoulder the impacts and costs of such discounting, and so the issue of environmental rights and justice will also need to be central in developing a new ocean agenda in order to address the problems that we are both creating today and have inherited from malpractices in the past.

There is fundamentally, in the middle of all this, the fact that the ocean, as the lifeblood of the planet, merits protection in its own right. The wonder it instils in individuals, its sheer beauty, and the feeling of calm it injects into the soul, all of which benefit human well‐being, must never be forgotten against the base arguments of pounds spent or invested. Sustaining and recovering the ocean is no doubt a key part of intergenerational equity, and actions must now deliver on the ideals that we are merely custodians of the ocean and should pass it on to future generations in no worse shape, and ideally in much better health, than it was passed to us.

The COVID‐19 pandemic is both a wake‐up call and a stark reminder about how all our fates are intrinsically linked. Just as the COVID‐19 pandemic has taught us all about what we now know can happen when people are forced into unnaturally close association with nature, so most people still do not realize just how dependent humanity is on a healthy ocean and its well‐being. We can and need to make clearer the links between human health, our well‐being, and the ocean's fate, whether this be through food, weather, or the oxygen we breathe. We need to rapidly build a greater understanding and appreciation of what that relationship is, why we should value it more, and what we must do to protect it.

Most people still do not appreciate how all our futures are in some way and at some point tied not just to the ocean but to individual species; for example, the horseshoe crab. Few people know that all pharmaceutical companies in the world rely on a particular horseshoe crab species, Limulus polyphemus. This is because the horseshoe crab's milky‐blue blood provides the only known natural source of limulus amoebocyte lysate (e.g. Mehmood, 2019). This is a substance that is extremely sensitive for detecting a contaminant called endotoxin, which is created by bacteria. If even a tiny amount of endotoxin makes its way into vaccines, injectable drugs, or other sterile pharmaceuticals, such as artificial knees and hips, the results can be deadly. Across health care, our well‐being and trust in those very medicines and medical procedures comes down to a reliance on this primitive marine creature. Without this species, medicine as we know it would not exist.

As economies around the world struggle to cope with the COVID‐19 virus, living in the hope of a vaccine so some day we can return to some form of normality, we will owe that (hopefully imminent) success, and the safety of such vaccines, in a large part to the ocean and one of the species that lives in it. This is a stark reminder that it is in all our interests to act now while there is still time to better protect the ocean and recover its health, for our health as a species is absolutely tied to the ocean's health. It is true to say that whether we act or not will depend on widespread recognition of the warning signs we now see at a whole ocean scale. We must heed the warning signs and act with new ambition and at scale to counter and overcome them, because what we do today will without a doubt define all our tomorrows.

6 RECOMMENDATIONS

The COVID‐19 pandemic and the opportunity to reflect on what is happening around that provide an opportunity through a new narrative to improve human well‐being and create a more equitable society and a healthier ocean. The health of the ocean is so closely intertwined with humanity's health that failure is not an option; early action will be more successful and will be less costly. In particular:

We must act now on the science and trends we see and not wait for a perfect solution. The scale and apparently accelerating rate of changes seen in the ocean require a joined‐up, whole‐ocean response to climate and biodiversity.

Current measures proposed or agreed for ocean protection are outdated, too small, too poorly coordinated, and too piecemeal to have an impact at a whole ocean scale given the level of observed changes.

Far more ambitious action is needed now-indecision and delay are at the cost to humanity of delivering the conditions to be able to gain greater benefits and make better choices in the future.

Acting now should focus on developing a 'plan B for ocean recovery' based on the eventuality that downward step‐changes in ocean health will dramatically start to impact humanity-a new 'Marshall‐style' plan for the ocean, akin to the ambition and drive used to rebuild societies after World War II (Wikipedia Contributors, 2019)3 is needed.

Speaking with one voice through a narrative that captures the latest science, concerns, and linkages to humanity is a precondition to action. Success, both now and in the future, can be increased by elevating everyone's understanding of our relationship with our planet's ocean and why it needs to become a central theme to everyone's lives. This includes the first, simple step of dropping the 's', recognizing the ocean as a single entity, and referring to the ocean in the singular.

APPENDIX A: FUNDAMENTAL FACTS ON WHAT THE OCEAN DOES FOR HUMANKIND

BACKGROUND

The healthy functioning of the ocean makes all life on Earth possible. It is essential to human existence and well‐being, providing vital regulating and functioning services. Our planet will not be able to sustain life as we know it if the state of the ocean continues to deteriorate because of human‐induced stressors.

As part of the preparations for the International Programme on the State of the Ocean 4 workshop a survey of the authors was undertaken, and a backing paper was prepared on ocean facts to help inform and ensure that people understand the fundamentals of what the ocean does for humankind. This appendix extracts key points from that paper to explain the role of the ocean, why it matters, and to underpin the urgency of action and the need for a new narrative. It represents the key areas identified by the authors for wider understanding.

SCALE

Physical scale of the ocean

Although water masses across the world are differentiated and habitats are diverse, they are all connected. There is only one ocean and it works at the Earth system level to make life on our planet possible. Damage to any part of the ocean can affect us all. The ocean covers 71% of the surface of the planet, extending vertically to 11,000 m deep in the Mariana Trench and contains close to 1,335 × 10 ⁶ km ³ of water that comprises 97% of all water on Earth (Reid, 2016).

Temporal scale of the ocean

Ocean ecosystems have dynamics that work at vastly different timescales from millions of years to daily cycles. For example, every day the largest migration on Earth occurs as gelatinous zooplankton, crustaceans, cephalopods, and fish rise to the ocean surface to feed, and then sink back to the deep ocean, transporting organic material through the water column and contributing to carbon cycling and storage in the ocean.

In comparison, it is estimated that it takes up to 1,000 years for any 1 m ³ of water to complete its journey through the thermohaline cycle (Bigg et al., 2003) transporting cold waters from the poles to the tropics and warm waters from the equator to the poles, a process that is essential in regulating Earth's temperature. It takes millions of years to form polymetallic nodules, now targeted for mining, in the abyss. Some of the changes occurring today will be impossible to reverse in human timescales; for example, those now being seen in changes to ocean circulation.

ROLE OF THE OCEAN

Oxygen

Oxygen is fundamental to life on Earth, and the ocean plays a vital role its production. Some 40-50% of the oxygen in our atmosphere was produced in the past by the ocean; thus, it is true to say that every second breath taken has come from the ocean.

Change

Recent research suggests the ocean is losing oxygen at an unprecedented rate; the overall level of oxygen in the ocean has decreased by approximately 2% since 1960 (Schmidtko, Stramma & Visbeck, 2017; Laffoley & Baxter, 2019). Some areas have lost much more oxygen over the few decades (up to 40%), but even very small declines can be catastrophic when oxygen availability is already low (Breitburg et al., 2018; Levin, 2018). A further decline in dissolved oxygen of between 1% and 7% is predicted by the end of the century, caused by a combination of reduced oxygen solubility and reduced mixing of deep waters (Laffoley & Baxter, 2019). Oxygen becomes less soluble at warmer water temperatures, which means that, as sea temperatures increase, dissolved oxygen content in the ocean decreases (Keeling, Körtzinger & Gruber, 2010; Gao et al., 2019).

Biological pump, carbon cycle, and storage

The oceanic biological pump is a key mechanism for removing CO ₂ from the atmosphere and involves a complex suite of processes that absorb CO ₂ from the atmosphere and then transfer it as carbon from the surface of the ocean to its depths (Honjo et al., 2014). During oceanic cycling of carbon, photosynthesis by marine plants and phytoplankton removes CO ₂ from surface waters and produces oxygen as a by‐product. Over 50% of global photosynthetic carbon fixation is undertaken by marine photosynthetic organisms (Falkowski & Raven, 2013).

Marine organisms that use CO ₂ to build calcium carbonate skeletons and structures-such as shellfish, coral, and some phytoplankton-also form a major component of the biological pump. Some key functional groups include phytoplankton such as coccolithophores and diatoms, which build calcareous or siliceous shells respectively (Rost & Riebesell, 2004). When these organisms die, they sink downwards to the seabed ballasted by their shells, where the organic carbon becomes buried at depth in marine sediments and is stored for millions of years (Ducklow, Steinberg & Buesseler, 2015). Zooplankton also play a vital role in the biological pump by feeding on phytoplankton and producing sinking faecal pellets. The diel (24 hr) migration of some species of zooplankton and micronekton between shallower and deeper ocean waters also contributes to the active transport of carbon; as these organisms migrate through the water column, they influence the pattern and magnitude of fluctuations of carbon (Ducklow, Steinberg & Buesseler, 2015). Through the removal of carbon from surface waters and the subsequent transport to the deep sea, the biological pump increases the capacity of the ocean to act as a sink for atmospheric CO ₂ (The Royal Society, 2005; Reid et al., 2009).

The deep sea of greater than 200 m depth occupies approximately 60% of the Earth's surface and plays a major role in carbon cycling; below 2,000 m it contributes to long‐term biological carbon storage and burial in the biosphere (Arístegui et al., 2009; Smith et al., 2009). When organic material settles on the deep‐sea floor it is becomes buried in ocean sediments by a series of biogeochemical processes (Wenzhöfer et al., 2001), thus removing the carbon from the atmosphere on geological timescales, which span thousands to millions of years (Thurber et al., 2014).

The sheer size of the ocean's carbon reserves and the high rate of uptake make the ocean a vital component in regulating excess CO ₂ in our atmosphere, and thus mitigating climate breakdown. The ocean is our planet's largest store of carbon (Lal, 2008), removing over 1 × 10 ⁶ tons of human‐made CO ₂ from the atmosphere every hour (Sabine et al., 2004) and having absorbed 28% of all human‐made CO ₂ emissions since 1750 (Gattuso et al., 2015).

Change

Without human interference, the natural flow of carbon between the sinks (oceanic, soil, and vegetation) would be roughly stable; however, disruption to the strength of the biological pump has significant consequences for the carbon sequestration capacity of the ocean, and therefore the amount of CO ₂ removed from the atmosphere (The Royal Society, 2005). Climate‐induced impacts, including ocean acidification, rising sea surface temperatures, and changes in light and nutrient availability, will affect the structure and composition of marine ecosystems, resulting in a knock‐on effect on the natural function of the biological pump (Rost & Riebesell, 2004).

Water

Fresh water is crucial to humankind, and the vast majority (97%) is cycled through the ocean.

It is the source of 86% of global evaporation, and 78% of all rain on Earth falls on the ocean (Baumgartner & Reichel, 1975), and these processes are fundamental components of the global water cycle (Yu, 2011). Evaporated moisture from the surface of the ocean is transported to land, where it falls as rain and is eventually returned to the ocean by rivers, groundwater flow, and the melting and discharge from glaciers and ice sheets, completing the water cycle (IPCC, 2019). Evaporation and precipitation govern the loss and gain of fresh water respectively, and the balance between these two processes determines the surface salinity of the ocean (Schmitt, 2008). Salinity, in turn, plays a key role in thermohaline circulation, as it influences water density; combined with water temperature, this leads to the sinking of cold, dense seawater near the poles, driving the global conveyor belt.

Change

As a result of increases in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, a 16-24% intensification of the global water cycle is predicted to occur in a 2-3°C warmer world (Durack, Wijffels & Matear, 2012). This change is already occurring and is causing fresh‐water regions to become fresher and salty regions to become saltier (Durack, Wijffels & Matear, 2012). The changes brought about by the intensification of the global water cycle and the corresponding redistribution of rainfall will have widespread impacts on ecosystems and societies (Durack, Wijffels & Matear, 2012), including changes in water quality and availability, food security, health and sanitation, and biodiversity (Grover, 2015). Increased rainfall also reduces the salinity, and therefore density, of ocean surface waters. This, combined with human‐induced warming, causes a weakening of thermohaline circulation, a key element of the global climate system (Marotzke, 2000). A significant reduction in the strength of the thermohaline cycle would lead to cooling in the North Atlantic, with northern and western Europe particularly affected (Link & Tol, 2004).

Nutrients

Nutrients are essential for the growth and health of all plants, including phytoplankton; and in locations where necessary nutrients are limited, the ability of a plant to photosynthesize can be reduced. Phosphorus, nitrogen, iron, and silica are present in the ocean in small quantities, and these nutrients can affect the rate of primary productivity, and ultimately the capacity of the ocean to sequester CO ₂ from the atmosphere (Falkowski, Barber & Smetacek, 1998; Bristow et al., 2017). Although these nutrients are supplied from external sources, namely atmospheric deposition and riverine input, the main source during photosynthesis is the recycling of nutrients through decomposition and deep water upwellings; approximately 80% of primary productivity in surface waters is supported through nitrogen recycling (Bristow et al., 2017).

Change

The enrichment of surface waters with nutrients from human development causes eutrophication, which contributes to oxygen depletion in the ocean (Breitburg et al., 2018) and can lead to deoxygenation and hypoxia, causing deterioration of water quality (Chislock et al., 2013). Increasing concentrations of nitrogen oxide, nitrous oxides, and ammonia have been released into the atmosphere as a result of industrial activity, leading to increased nitrogen deposition in the ocean. These additional inputs of nitrogen have changed the ratio of phosphorus to nitrogen in some regions, particularly the North Pacific, causing disruption to open ocean nutrient cycles, especially in nutrient‐limited areas (Kim et al., 2014; Ren et al., 2017). Ocean warming and increased stratification are also altering nutrient availability and, as a result, primary productivity, particularly in low‐latitude upwelling regions (Bindoff et al., 2019).

Weather

The ocean regulates global weather and climate through the storage and transport of heat around the planet, via the conveyor belt‐like system known as thermohaline circulation, in which deep ocean currents transport cold waters from the poles to the tropics and warm waters from the equator to the poles. As warmer waters evaporate, the temperature and humidity of the surrounding air increases, forming storms and clouds that are carried around the Earth by prevailing winds, known as trade winds. These trade winds are part of a complex global wind system that drives surface ocean‐circling currents called gyres, which transfer heat from the tropics to the polar regions. The ocean also causes the formation of tropical cyclones, known as hurricanes or typhoons depending on the region in which they occur. These intense storm systems form almost exclusively over areas of tropical ocean where sea surface temperatures exceed 26°C (Trenberth et al., 2018). A resulting rise of warm air generates changes in air pressure and the formation of clouds to force the high and damaging winds of these storms.

Change

The warming of the ocean as a result of climate breakdown now being observed is already contributing to an increase in the intensity and duration of extreme weather events, such as tropical cyclones, flooding, heatwaves, and droughts (Trenberth et al., 2018). A recent study found that an intensification of sea surface winds since the 1990s, likely caused by changes in atmospheric circulation as a result of greenhouse gas warming, has resulted in a speeding up of ocean currents, equivalent to a 15% increase per decade in the energy of currents (Hu et al., 2020). This acceleration could have effects that will be felt around the planet, with changes to ocean heat storage, CO ₂ uptake, and weather patterns (Voozen, 2020).

Climate‐induced changes to the intensity and spatial distribution of rainfall, if substantial, pose one of the greatest risks associated with climate change (Wentz et al., 2007). It is anticipated that for every degree Celsius of warming in the Earth's lower atmosphere there will be a 7% increase in the atmospheric moisture content as a result of the ability of warmer air to hold more water vapour (Schmitt, 2008). This will cause an intensification of existing patterns of ocean evaporation and precipitation, leading to extreme weather events such as floods and droughts, with wet regions becoming wetter and dry regions becoming drier in response to global warming (Durack et al., 2012).

Climate

Change

If the amount of thermal energy entering the ocean is greater than the thermal energy leaving, the average temperature will increase (Faizal & Ahmed, 2011). This change is already seen to be happening, as in the past 50 years the ocean has absorbed 93% of the excess heat generated by greenhouse gas emissions (Levitus et al., 2012). The average global sea surface temperature has increased by approximately 0.11°C every decade since the 1970s and by an estimated 1°C since the Industrial Revolution (IPCC, 2019).

Because the ocean plays such a critical role in regulating Earth's climate, a rise in sea temperature will also result in potentially significant changes to the climate system.

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Evolving the narrative for protecting a rapidly changing ocean, post‐COVID‐19

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D. Laffoley Corresponding Author IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas, IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), Gland, Switzerland Correspondence D. Laffoley, IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas, IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), 28 rue Mauverney, CH‐1196 Gland, Switzerland. Email: danlaffoley@btinternet.com Search for more papers by this author P.C.

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A mural created by Eimear McNally during a workshop we held in Dublin in 2019.

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A mural created by Eimear McNally during a workshop we held in Dublin in 2019.

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To see more about that check out this page: https://www.catchingawave.org/workshop-dublin-7-june-2019

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A chance to dive into Art, Science, Technology & Knowledge at this years' 4th International Marine Science Communication Conference

Check the programme
https://commocean.org/conference-programme

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Catching A Wave took part in this years' GirlCon Chicago Digital Event. As part of the TECH + ART session we presented the project and invited participants to contribute by telling us why combining art, science, technology for ocean sustainability is important to them? A huge thank you to those that sent in their interesting and inspiring submissions - all of which are available below connected to this post for you to read and leave a comment on. More on the GirlCon event is also available in our blog post on the website.

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We presented in the TECH + ART session on the very first day. In 45 minutes we tried to explain, present and showcase what we are trying to do as the Catching A Wave (CaW) collective by integrating Art, Science and Technology, where and what role this can play and to what extent this can contribute to environmental sustainability as well as impact and influence the social challenges of our day. After introducing all the team member of the CaW collective and mention our diverse backgrounds and roles we have within the project we kicked off. This session was mainly to be about the technological side of our project so we illustrated the different technical elements within the process of creating the glass waves. Using which techniques, old and new, as well as how they are captured and produced was explained in detail by Kristin and Lisa Beth. The project is at its core about coastal sustainability and ocean health addressing critical boundaries and human vulnerabilities like sea level rise as a consequence of climate change using scientific knowledge to underpin this. As earlier pointed out in the keynote by IBM's René Bostic and Janine Sneed the need for and the importance of equal and fair opportunities for all was something Shona reiterated by explaining the context of our project, not just from an environmental and ocean health perspective but also peoples' well-being and how and why the Catching A Wave project is more than an environmental expression emphasising the need for human equality and social justice. Hester gave a demonstration of the project website and the different channels of engagement and methods we use to communicate and connect with our different audiences. One of the key features of the CaW project is our opportunity to bring our joint knowledge and experience together for a greater good and it was this we tried to convey with our presentation that together you can do so much more. Which led nicely in how we think it is important to listen to others and always remain open to change. We ended the session with a request to our audience to send us their expressions (either a short essay or a video) on why combining tech, art and science is important for ocean sustainability to them?

"I loved the combination of art, science, technology, social justice, and community awareness that Catch A Wave incorporated into the conversation!" GirlCon participant

"...this was a great reminder for me about the real problems of climate change and global warming, how it affects the ocean and wildlife, and how we can use art and our voices to help change behaviors/habits!" GirlCon participant

Here below we will include links to some of the submissions once they have all been reviewed. Each submission will also receive a small glass wave and have the opportunity to become part of our
Planetary Wave project .

GirlCon is an annual Chicago-based event that is taking place in mid-July. Due to the circumstances, it will be virtual this year. GirlCon has breakout sessions from numerous companies that the attendees will have the opportunity to learn from and make connections with. We focus on how technology is a huge factor in EVERY career field, whether it be science, fashion, or anything that students are passionate about. The lack of diversity in STEM is a big issue that everyone on the GirlCon team is striving to fix. The attendees will have a chance to personally connect with companies from many different career paths and gain advice from women in both college and the workforce.

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GirlCon Chicago | USA | 20-25.7.2020 | Catchingawave

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We presented in the TECH + ART session on the very first day. In 45 minutes we tried to explain, present and showcase what we are trying to do as the Catching A Wave (CaW) collective by integrating Art, Science and Technology, where and what role this can play and to what extent this can contribute to environmental sustainability as well as impact and influence the social challenges of our day.

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A IOC UNESCO summary report for 20187-2018
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000367865/PDF/367865eng.pdf.multi

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Diving into Art, Science, Technology, Knowledge, and more

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CATCHING A WAVE @ ART IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

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CATCHING A WAVE @ ART IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

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The second edition of our immersive workshop will take place in June 2019 in Dublin during the Art in te Anthropocene conference. More on the conference
https://artintheanthropocene.com/

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https://www.catchingawave.org/

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The Irish Ocean Literacy Network, is an all Ireland group of people working towards educating the public about Ocean Literacy Principles.

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Update on progress in measuring four of the targets for SDG 14 (life below water)

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Update on progress in measuring four of the targets for SDG 14 (life below water)

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IOC-UNESCO Provides Update on SDG 14 Indicator Development

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Working in Orphan Space: the art and science of melding sustenance and the sublime

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Working in Orphan Space: the art and science of melding sustenance and the sublime

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Here's a link to my full presentation on Orphan Spaces for the Sea & Society conference

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What will it take to create a public for the ocean?

by Mrill Ingram

December 1, 2018

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Lisa Beth Robinson and Kristin Thielking were attempting something completely new -to digitally capture, and cast in glass, a three- dimensional model of a real, live wave.

The two artists have worked together for years, exploring a mutual fascination with the ocean, creating glass boats of different colors and textures. But their goal to sculpt a wave represented new levels of challenge. First, there was the technological feat of digitally capturing something moving and transparent. Second, they aimed to use their art to catch people's attention and wake them up to vast changes that loom for the ocean.

"Every second breath you take comes from oceans," says Robinson. "All that phytoplankton is a huge generator of the oxygen you breathe."

"People don't consider the ocean's relevance to their lives, especially if they are not on a coast," observes Thielking. So she and Robinson want to create a series of glass columns, each topped with a rendering of an ocean wave and placed in unexpected locations, such as grocery stores or parks. The installations will use light and sound as well as text to describe the art and science behind capturing a wave, and why it matters.

"We want people to think about how the ocean is part of our daily lives and our survival," Thielking says. "We can use the beauty and mystery of the glass to draw people in-to bring the ocean to the people."

Many of us are at least superficially familiar with the vast changes occurring in the ocean. There's the Giant Pacific Garbage Patch that's grown to be more than twice the size of Texas. Climate-change driven increases in ocean temperatures are sending fish swimming toward the poles in search of cooler water, and turbo-charging hurricane seasons. As water warms it melts polar ice and also expands, both of which drive up sea levels. Higher seas flood coastal cities, erode beaches, swamp protective mangroves, and intrude into freshwater aquifers relied on for drinking water. Increased atmospheric carbon dioxide has already acidified ocean waters by 30 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, wreaking havoc on coral reefs and even oyster farms. And we know too well the ever-present danger of oil spills in a post-Deepwater Horizon world.

But that's just the tip of the fast-melting iceberg. Other changes are coming on the heels of new maritime industries poised for launch, including massive offshore wind, tidal, and wave energy developments; oil and gas production in "ultra-deep" water; marine biotech prospecting; and seabed mining. A warming planet is causing Arctic ice to retreat, opening up millions of square miles to new activities including shipping, fishing, and the extraction of minerals, oil, and gas.

Any single one of these activities portends huge impacts on the ocean, and while this "blue growth" promises new sources of food, energy, and other resources, it also involves a strong push to privatize the Earth's largest commons. Ocean advocates are scrambling to keep up, and too few of us know what's going on.

The artists want to help change that.

In many ways, the open ocean is another, largely unexplored planet-we have better resolution maps of the surface of the moon, Mars, and Venus than we do of the Earth's ocean floor. Ocean water makes it difficult for satellites to map the seabed; much of what we know comes from deep ocean drilling and core sampling.

Over the past three decades, such exploration has changed our ideas about plate tectonics, ancient climates, and even our understanding of life. We've found enormous microbial diversity in marine sediments, for example, and sea organisms able to flourish in complete darkness on a diet of methane and sulfur. There's life as deep as 8,000 feet, and at extreme temperatures, living near deep-sea hydrothermal vents above 230 degrees Fahrenheit.

The DNA of this deep sea life is of keen interest to biopharmaceutical, biofuel, and chemical interests. By 2025, the global market for marine biotech is projected to reach $6.4 billion, a promise that has companies rushing to patent "marine genetic resources" to ensure their exclusive access to the promising economic benefits of the deep sea. The 2010 Nagoya Protocol created international obligations around sharing the benefits of genetic resources and their products, but only for those sourced from within national boundaries. No such mechanism currently exists for the "high seas"-the open ocean and deep seabed lying outside of the 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone of any country.

A study published this past June revealed that 221 companies have registered 84 percent of all marine genetics patents, and a single one, German chemical manufacturer BASF, has gobbled up 47 percent-taken from microbes, fish, and even whales. Less rich countries without resources to explore, let alone develop, new technologies are entirely left out of the race to "own" these genetic resources.

Though they've long been accepted as res communis -common heritage of all people and held in trust for future generations-the ocean deeps are increasingly being treated as a private gold mine.

The high seas represent about 45 percent of the Earth's surface, and 64 percent of the ocean's surface. And though they've long been accepted as res communis -common heritage of all people and held in trust for future generations-the ocean deeps are increasingly being treated by individual states and corporations as a private gold mine.

Take the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, for example, a deep abyss stretching between Hawaii and Mexico. Since 2001, mining companies have been allowed to stake claims on the ocean floor, after the discovery that vast stretches of it (some 770,000 square miles) are dotted with small, round "polymetallic nodules," rich in nickel, iron, cobalt, and other metals useful for making phones and computers. But the zone also hosts deep sea corals and a truly astounding breadth of deep sea life (just Google " headless chicken monster" or " Casper the Octopod ").

Scientists and ocean advocates are fretting about how the impacts of mining, including toxic effluent and clouds of sediment, could harm ocean creatures. But as in fracking, mining interests insist on secrecy, so environmental threats are difficult to identify.

"You've got [thirty] people making decisions about half the planet behind closed doors," observed one environmental group representative at a 2017 International Seabed Authority technical meeting of companies and experts with deep sea mining interests.

And even if environmental impacts were somehow identified up front, it isn't clear what treaties or other mechanisms are robust enough to offer real protection or ensure rules are followed. The International Seabed Authority, for example, is part of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which was created in 1982 as a global framework to coordinate development and resolve questions of equity and environmental risk. But the United States, beginning with Ronald Reagan, has refused to sign on the basis that seabed mining rules are too burdensome, and, in the words of his U.N. ambassador, "thinly disguised world collectivism."

All these threats to the ocean commons can seem very distant in the daily life of a busy landlubber though, and that's something Robinson and Thielking want to see change.

The artists were inspired to take on the technical challenge of capturing a wave after initial discussions with John McCord of the Coastal Studies Institute at East Carolina University.

McCord works with photogrammetry, widely used to generate three-dimensional digital images of the seafloor, and also has access to the university's wave tank, used in tidal energy technology research. "I told them I was up for the challenge," he said, "but there's a high possibility we'll fail."

Thielking traveled from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, where she is an art professor, to North Carolina to work with McCord and Robinson. They had a week. They had figured out they needed a domed shape hanging above the wave tank, to position some dozen cameras that would simultaneously register an image of a wave from multiple angles. Their challenges included syncing the cameras to 1/1000th of a second, and then tricking the photogrammetry software to register the water surface. "It doesn't like anything shiny or clear, said McCord. "Our first attempts got great images of the tank floor."

They tried dusting the water with confetti, which got waterlogged, providing inaccurate images of the wave's surface. They tried poly string yarn, which was hydrophobic, but failed to cover enough surface area for the cameras to pick up the complexity of the wave.

"I am not sure what led to us to think of sawdust, but that was the trick," said McCord. The coup de grâce was the artists jumping into the wave tank with boogie boards to create a random wave pattern, after the team realized that the tank's own waves were too smooth.

"Ocean waves have a randomness about them driven primarily by wind, which results in different heights, durations, and shapes," explains Robinson. "It's also what makes them so beautiful."

"I am not sure what led to us to think of sawdust, but that was the trick."

So if Thielking and Robinson's goal is to help create more of a "public" for the ocean-people who understand its role in the health of the planet system and value its treasure trove of abundant, unusual life, not just its $2.5 trillion GDP -what might we look to to avoid a tragedy of the ocean commons?

It's hard to feel confident looking at the existing holey patchwork of sea governance. Despite decades of attempting to negotiate sustainable yields, for example, the world's fishing capacity is at a whopping 250 percent of sustainable maximum harvest.

"Some people might say we've made progress managing fish on the high seas, others not," says Merrick Burden, economist for the Environmental Defense Fund's oceans program of fisheries management. "If there is progress, it's not very much." A big problem, he says, is that the organizations charged with managing international fisheries can involve large numbers of countries with different needs, cultures, and objectives. "Setting common goals among countries with such large differences for the ocean is really hard," he says.

Burden notes that "bottom up" agreements have sometimes worked where large international ones have not. He points to the Parties to the Nauru Agreement via which eight island nations achieved desired tuna population levels.

But, clearly, for an interconnected ocean, large-scale cooperation is needed. According to research from 2015, just thirteen corporations control up to 40 percent of the ocean's largest and most valuable fish stocks and dominate all segments of seafood production including aquaculture.

Along those lines, Liz Karan of the Pew Charitable Trusts sees the World Trade Organization as a critical piece of high seas' stewardship. Pew is asking WTO members to adopt a binding agreement that would limit subsidies for vessels, fuel, and equipment that drive overfishing.

Clearly, the ocean needs more advocates to push back against the forces of privatization and to build support for a healthy future for the ocean and its Earth.

Another key element, says Karan, is creating-and enforcing-a network of ocean sanctuaries. Member countries of the Convention on Biological Diversity set a goal to protect 10 percent of the ocean by 2020. But new analysis established that this is too little to effectively help the ocean recover from the exhaustive operation that defines much of today's high tech fishing. Add to that how climate change upends ocean ecology, and at least 30 percent of the world's marine area needs protection.

At this point only 7.4 percent of the ocean has these protections, and even the goal of 10 percent looks unlikely. But Karan is hopeful.

"We are heading into a pivotal time for oceans and 2020 will be a big year," she says. The United Nations has proclaimed a "Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development" beginning in 2021, and Karan sees "a wave of recognition that something needs to be done."

The United Nations has convened formal treaty negotiations to hammer out new agreements on the ocean commons, with the next meeting planned for April 2019. "It's about looking at these resources as belonging to everyone, not unduly exploited, and that areas of biological importance are preserved," Karan says. "The ocean is one living system."

Two ocean stewardship agreements that might offer models include the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, signed by twenty-four countries and the European Union. Another is the Agreement to Prevent Unregulated High Seas Fisheries in the Central Arctic Ocean. It's a first in proactive ocean conservation, barring unregulated fishing in the high seas of the central Arctic-which are opening up as sea ice melts-until more is known about the newly accessible ocean.

But as much as international cooperation is critical for global problems like climate change and ocean stewardship, it's an ever-elusive goal. The United States has continued to refuse to sign the Law of the Sea. And under the Trump Administration, U.S. participation in such agreements looks shakier than ever. Earlier this year, Donald Trump rescinded an Obama-era cooperative strategy for U.S. waters put in place in 2011 after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. And on October 24, despite long-term and widespread opposition, the administration approved the first Arctic offshore oil drilling development in U.S. waters.

Clearly, the ocean needs more advocates, including people who believe in strong multilateral agreements that push back against the forces of privatization and support a healthy future for the ocean and the Earth. This is what Robinson and Thielking aspire to.

This fall the two artists joined with Future Earth Coasts, an international research project on environmental change in the coastal zone, to take their wave project on the road, They presented during a session on the U.N. Sustainable Development Goal 14, "Life Below Water," at an international meeting.

"What we want to do is broaden the conversation," Shona Paterson of Future Earth Coasts said at the conference. "And art is one way to do that."

It took the full week, but the art-science team succeeded in capturing a three-dimensional image of a wave, albeit one in captivity. The team sent the image to a large 3D printer to generate the model from which Thielking could create a glass mold. They had their wave

.

Their initial firing included "wavelets"-prototypes of the larger wave sculptures. "We want people to be able to pick these up and physically connect with them," Thielking says. "We imagine these little waves infiltrating communities and homes, reminders that we are interdependent."

The wavelets are paperweight sized, and fascinating, with surfaces complicated by random patterns. The shiny sides reveal layers of green, blue, and white, suggesting a vertical complexity in the ocean waters.

Holding the wavelets up to light reveals patterns of bubbles and, delightfully, words. One of them reads, "Breath."

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Lisa Beth Robinson and Kristin Thielking were attempting something completely new -to digitally capture, and cast in glass, a three- dimensional model of a real, live wave. The two artists have worked together for years, exploring a mutual fascination with the ocean, creating glass boats of different colors and textures.

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A graphic novel from the 4th International Symposium on the Effects of Climate Change on the World’s Oceans

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A graphic novel from the 4th International Symposium on the Effects of Climate Change on the World’s Oceans

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A professional graphic artist attended the meeting, and produced a range of amazingly insightful and often poignant cartoons as an effective means to share lessons from the conference in real time. As an entree into the special theme set, a selection of the cartoons has been assembled here, providing a narrative of the meeting and offering areas for future consideration.

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graphic novel from the 4th International Symposium on the Effects of Climate Change on the World's Oceans

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Abstract. The world's oceans are changing in response to a changing climate, these changes have significant consequences, there is much at risk, and action is

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Interdisciplinarity has become all the rage as scientists tackle society’s biggest problems. But there is still strong resistance to crossing borders.

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Using Satire to Communicate Science | Research shows that while satire does carry some risks, it can be an effective tool for communication. Scientists are giving it a go.

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Using Satire to Communicate Science | Research shows that while satire does carry some risks, it can be an effective tool for communication. Scientists are giving it a go.

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"W e do not care about planet Earth," four French scientists declared in February in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. If humans are exhausting the planet's resources, they wrote, it's Earth that needs to adapt - not us. The authors issued a warning: "Should planet Earth stick with its hardline ideological stance...we will seek a second planet."

They were joking, of course. Lead author Guillaume Chapron, a quantitative ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, works mainly on conserving wolves and other large carnivores. He does care about the Earth. In fact, he and his coauthors all signed a paper in BioScience last year called "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice." It was a dire summary of the world's dwindling resources, signed by more than 15,000 scientists. But Chapron worried the gesture was useless: "My concern was that [the] paper would be published and nothing would change," he says. Yes, thousands of scientists agreed things were bad. "And then so what? So nothing."

Against this backdrop, Chapron decided to turn to France's robust literary tradition of using wit, irony, and exaggeration to expose human failings. "We wanted to show that, basically, people are not ready to adjust their way of life to save the planet," he says. Chapron doubts most other scientists would treat their topics in this way. But maybe more of them should. Over a decade's worth of research shows that while satire does carry some risks, it can be an effective tool for communication. Satire can capture people's attention and make complex topics accessible to a wider audience. In some circumstances, it can even sway beliefs. If scientists want to communicate with the public about a serious subject, they might try a joke.

To understand how satire can influence an audience, several researchers have looked at climate change. One of them is Paul Brewer, a communications researcher at the University of Delaware, who got his first faculty job around the time Jon Stewart took over hosting "The Daily Show" in 1999. Brewer at first used the show as a teaching tool. Then, because a lot of his students watched it, he realized it might make a good research subject.

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Since then, Brewer's studies of satirical TV news have shown that these programs can affect people's beliefs. In a 2015 study, Brewer and graduate student Jessica McKnight showed university students a video clip from "The Daily Show" or "The Colbert Report"about climate change, or a control video on another topic. Stewart used jokes and sarcasm to address the subject, while Stephen Colbert spoke ironically, in his usual character of an over-the-top conservative pundit. After seeing either satirical news clip, subjects reported a greater certainty that global warming is happening.

In 2017, Brewer and McKnight looked at a segment from another satirical news show, "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver."Oliver had pitted 97 climate scientists against 3 climate change deniers to create a "statistically representative climate change debate." The researchers showed either this clip or a control video to 288 participants. Watching the debate clip increased subjects' confidence in climate change - as well as their perception that scientists agreed on the issue. The effect was strongest among people who reported less interest in the topic beforehand, Brewer says. "It mattered the most among people who aren't already engaged with the issue."

In more recent research that hasn't been published yet, Brewer has been looking at satirical coverage of other scientific issues including vaccines, evolution, and GMOs. Based on preliminary results, he thinks satire may be especially effective for communicating messages about vaccines.

Although the late-night TV hosts have gotten a lot of research attention, Amy Becker of Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore veered away from satirical news in her study published this summer about "sarcastic content." She showed university students a video from The Onion, another video by The Weather Channel, or a control video. Both non-control videos were humorous takes on climate change. But the Onion video had a clear point of view, illustrated by its wry title: "Climate Change Researcher Describes Challenge of Pulling Off Worldwide Global Warming Conspiracy." In contrast, the Weather Channel video poked fun at people who both do and don't believe in climate change.

Becker found that only the Onion video had an effect. It increased people's certainty that climate change was happening while also increasing their perception of the magnitude of the problem. As with previous studies, the video only made a difference among people who didn't already think climate change was an important issue. "It seems that one-sided sarcasm can activate less-interested individuals to engage with the climate change issue," the authors wrote.

L auren Feldman, a communication researcher at Rutgers University who studies the media, has some ideas about why satire is effective for delivering messages. For a start, she says, humor gets eyeballs. "One of the chief benefits of satire, and comedy more broadly, is to promote attention in our very crowded, noisy media environment," she says.

In a 2011 collection of essays on satirical news, Feldman and colleagues published research that found that people who watched more satirical news were more likely to follow news about science and technology, the environment, and global warming. The effect was strongest for people with the lowest levels of formal education. "Comedy and satire help pull people in and help make those topics more accessible," she says.

Furthermore, people inclined to disagree with an idea may argue less if it's presented satirically. "Because people are focused more on understanding the joke and processing the humor, they have fewer resources leftover to counter-argue any message that they might disagree with," Feldman says. "That allows some persuasive messages to kind of seep in and penetrate whereas otherwise they might not."

So far, research on the subject has mostly assumed that comedians share the values of scientists, Feldman adds. But humor could also manipulate audiences in the opposite direction. "Comedy could just as easily be used to engage people with perspectives that misrepresent or undermine science," she says.

Another risk: people might not get the joke. A 2009 study found that conservatives were more likely than liberals to think Stephen Colbert's television persona was genuine. Paul Brewer's study found the same thing - although, Brewer notes, it didn't make Colbert's message any less persuasive than Jon Stewart's to the overall study group.

Even when people do get the joke, satire can be very polarizing, Feldman says. "It attracts an audience who is already pretty liberal in orientation, and it in many ways preaches to the choir." This can help mobilize like-minded audiences, but "it can also be really alienating to the other side." It's also possible that joking about a subject could make it seem less serious, Feldman says.

Not many scientists are using satire to deliver messages. There was a 2011 Biotropica paper recommending that Greece and Spain be reforested and populated with large animals. "Both countries face economic challenges that could be reduced by the revenues from ecotourism," the authors wrote. "Lions could be reintroduced to Greece ... and gorillas might thrive in Spain." The authors wanted to show how conservation efforts often ignore the perspective of people who live in an area. Another paper called "Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken" parodied unintelligible scientific writing.

Outside of science, Feldman is now working on a book about how social justice organizations are using comedy to engage the public. Feldman says that so far, the benefits researchers have found in satire are mostly restricted to laboratory settings. She thinks more research is needed to understand how satire affects audiences in the real world. But for writers who are considering satire to get a point across, she says, "I don't think there's any harm in experimentation."

Guillaume Chapron, the author of the satirical warning to Earth, agrees. "The environmental crisis has reached such a scale that it is no longer justifiable to dispense with some communication tools," he and his coauthors wrote in a follow-up paper.

Chapron doesn't think satire should replace the traditional ways that scientists communicate facts and research. But when it comes to messages that are important for policy decisions, he thinks satire has a role. It's naive of scientists to assume that their data alone are enough to change anything, Chapron says. "Facts do not tell you what you have to do."

He admits the reaction to his satirical paper wasn't earth-shattering. William Ripple and the other authors of the "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity" letter called Chapron's paper " humorous, refreshing, and potentially effective." Chapron has heard about some readers who are still talking about the paper in their labs, he says. He's heard of others who thought his paper shouldn't have been published in the first place, or that it damages the credibility of academia.

"Of course it makes people uncomfortable," he says. "But that's the role of satire."
Elizabeth Preston is a freelance writer whose work can be found in New Scientist, Discover, Quanta, The Atlantic, and STAT News, among other publications.

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More than a decade's worth of research shows that while satire carries some risks, it can be an effective communication tool. Scientists are paying attention.

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Artists: apply for a residency at Europe’s largest geoscience conference

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Artists: apply for a residency at Europe’s largest geoscience conference

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Artists: apply for a residency at Europe's largest geoscience conference

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After a successful trial in 2018, when the European Geosciences Union (EGU) officially hosted a cartoonist and a poet in residence at its annual meeting, we are now opening a call for artists to apply for a residency at the EGU 2019 General Assembly. The deadline for applications is 1 December.

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The Human Signature: Edward Burtynsky's Anthropocene – in pictures

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The Human Signature: Edward Burtynsky's Anthropocene – in pictures

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The Human Signature: Edward Burtynsky's Anthropocene - in pictures

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Burtynsky's unsettling large-scale images of industrial-scale extraction, urbanisation and deforestation reveal humanity's devastating impact on the planet

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Blog platform: The Metanarrative Project | 

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Blog platform: The Metanarrative Project | 

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Focuses on the theoretical and normative attributes of systems of global governance, and on the evolution of new forms of governance to meet current social-ecological challenges

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Constructing a New Global Narrative about Planetary Sustainability

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https://towardsdatascience.com/coral-cities-an-ito-design-lab-concept-c01a3f4a2722

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2 ARTICLES: Culture and Conservation Beneath the Sea and A new dimension to marine restoration: 3D printing coral reefs

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2 ARTICLES: Culture and Conservation Beneath the Sea and A new dimension to marine restoration: 3D printing coral reefs

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/travel/artificial-reefs-and-underwater-museums.html
and
https://news.mongabay.com/wildtech/2018/08/a-new-dimension-to-marine-restoration-3d-printing-coral-reefs/

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Clyde Reflections book chapter on the art-science process

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Clyde Reflections book chapter on the art-science process

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Clyde Reflections - a film and audio-visual installation (Hurrel and Brennan, 33:12, 2014)

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Clyde Reflections - a film and audio-visual installation (Hurrel and Brennan, 33:12, 2014)

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https://vimeo.com/89793693

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An art-science collaboration between marine social scientists Iain MacKinnon and Ruth Brennan, and visual artist and film-maker Stephen Hurrel

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Sea Stories: an online interactive cultural map of the sea.

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Sea Stories: an online interactive cultural map of the sea.

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mappingthesea.net/barra
A Hurrel and Brennan art-science collaboration

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Recent art-science paper: Re-storying marine conservation: Integrating art and science to explore and articulate ideas, visions and expressions of marine space 

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Recent art-science paper: Re-storying marine conservation: Integrating art and science to explore and articulate ideas, visions and expressions of marine space 

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Link to open access post-print: https://marxiv.org/wmbzg/
Published paper DOI: 10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2018.01.036

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Results from our session poll on What we associate with SDG14 -Life Below Water

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Micro Museums https://micro.ooo/

SciArt Centre https://www.sciartcenter.org/#

Science Gallery https://international.sciencegallery.com/

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VIDEO:Kids on the Sustainable Development Goals

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VIDEO:Kids on the Sustainable Development Goals

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CommOcean
http://www.commocean.org/

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Blog post of the Society and the Sea conference 2018

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A joint blog post of Future Earth Coasts (FEC) (Shona Paterson, Hester Whyte & Martin Le Tissier), MaREI (ERI/UCC) (Aoife Deane), East Carolina University (Lisa Beth Robinson), University of Wisconsin (Kristin Thielking) and geographer & author Mrill Ingram. Are we going about it all wrong? Tell you what - let's throw a bunch of artists and a geographer from the States plus an Irish public engagement specialist in the FEC-ing mix and explore how we can make Sustainable Development Goal 14 Life Below Water more prominent on peoples agenda....so the scene setting began for a workshop session held at the second Society and Sea conference where we explored how Art could facilitate, ignite and support Global Coastal sustainability.
Connecting Art & Science in Support of Coastal Sustainability Development

In a world of constantly shifting biophysical and social realities, we face an ever-evolving and urgent need for new ideas around the conception and realisation of sustainable development. This is especially pertinent in coastal land and sea spaces: spaces where the greatest confluence of societal activities occurs and some of the most productive and dynamic natural systems must co-exist. Despite continued discourse around the importance of the oceans and coasts, epitomised by Sustainable Development Goal 14, Life Below Water, gaining traction remains agonisingly slow when it comes to shifting behaviours or resonating with society on a broader scale. But how do we broaden the conversation? How do we change our own operating procedures in order to galvanise momentum for action?

We all recognise that people process knowledge and communicate that knowledge differently. Historically there has been a strong connection between the Arts and Sciences, just think of the work of Leonardo da Vinci who is recognised as a master of Art and Science. Both Science and Art share a common motivation and goal to understand and describe the world around us. Art, in its many and varied forms, has the liberty and ability to generate shifts in social perceptions and behaviors in ways that science and data alone currently do not. An immediate need to reinvigorate linkages between the arts and sciences is in order to address urgent issues of our time. It is around this statement that a long-held dream was dragged into reality during the Society and the Sea Conference in Greenwich, UK (Sept 6-7 th).

Despite recognition of the need to connect art and science more closely, truly integrated, co-designed, and co-produced collaborations between art and science disciplines are still rare. We (FEC) in collaboration with two talented artists (Lisa Beth Robinson and Kristin Thielking from East Carolina University and the University of Wisconsin respectively), an author and geographer (Mrill Ingram) and a communication and engagement specialist (Aoife Dean from MaREI) are attempting to do our bit to change this.

Our session at Society and the Sea, entitled Thresholds: Art, Social Impact and Reinvention, engaged both artists and scientists in a facilitated knowledge exchange designed to generate collaborative pathways for action. By discussing past and current projects, as well as future aspirations, we were able to outline opportunities and challenges for art-science integration throughout project instigation, execution, and sustainability phases.

ONGOING OUTPUT: To capture the session not only before and during the workshop but also to become a platform that lives on beyond the conference we set up a Padlet site. An online space where you can find all the presentations as well as the session abstract, interesting links and photos. To access the padlet site go to: https://padlet.com/FutureEarthCoasts/ArtSea Note: You can comment on the existing content or add anything you think can be of interest by simply logging into the Padlet site.

What I found most profound in the post-presentation discussion was the way the scientists stepped outside traditional boundaries to reflect on their passion for their work. We observed them envisioning how collaborating with artists at the initiation of a project had the potential to create entirely new solutions that are beautiful and would reach a much broader audience. The energy in the room was exciting and I wish we had more time to talk. Lisa Beth Robinson

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Society and the Sea | 6 & 7 September 2018 | London, UK - Future Earth Coasts

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InvestInBlue: What's Art got to do with it? Society and Sea conference | Greenwich | 6 & 7 September 2018 A joint blog post of Future Earth Coasts (FEC) (Shona Paterson, Hester Whyte & Martin Le Tissier), MaREI (ERI/UCC) (Aoife Deane), East Carolina University (Lisa Beth Robinson), University of Wisconsin (Kristin Thielking) and geographer &...