The Global Pandemic Has Shown We Need an Action Plan for the Ocean

The urgency of the challenge requires an internationally coordinated effort that draws on existing global research capacity and networks; a key opportunity presented by the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development 2021-2030 (UNESCO-IOC, 2021) that must not be missed if we are to minimize change in ocean systems and impacts on the services they provide to society. Without mitigation and adaptation measures, sea level rise scenarios project annual losses of 0.3–9.3% of global GDP by 2100 (IPCC, 2019; equivalent to ~US$0.25 to US$7.88 trillion per year based on 2020 GDP, World Bank, 2021), while losses from declines in ocean health and services by 2050 are projected to be US$428 billion per year, and by 2100 US$1.979 trillion per year. Over the last decade, a number of programmes and projects have driven international efforts to develop the integration of human systems in global ocean ecosystem science, including the Integrated Marine Biosphere Research (IMBeR) project (Hofmann et al., 2015) to which the authors contribute. To help meet this challenge, the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development 2021-2030 (UNESCO-IOC, 2021) provides an opportunity to build global support systems for informing decision making on the critical time scales of the coming years and decades.