Climate change is redistributing ocean biodiversity, including species and habitats we want to protect as well as exploited marine resources. These changes challenge the effectiveness of Marine Spatial Planning processes. Climate-adaptive solutions for the spatial management of the ocean are therefore a global ambition for policy developers. We invite examples from around the world, where climate change evidence is informing the design of spatial mechanisms supporting adaptive management practices. Case-studies focused on observational, modelling, social science and science-policy dialogue are welcome contributions, including those focused on adaptive climate change mitigation solutions, when showcasing approaches currently implemented or in development.

Recent high impact scientific publications show that global wild fish landings are now the same as twenty years ago, but requiring 20% more fuel while climate change is likely to reduce landings. Moreover, fuel use in capture fisheries emits greenhouse gases, which in turn impacts the capture fisheries. Recent technological and scientific advances can help adapt to climate change and mitigate emissions from capture fisheries. The term ‘smart’ is starting to be used to highlight how the primary sector of the economy can benefit from these developments. This session aims to gather the latest research on evaluation of fuel use and emission, strategies to reduce fishing-related emission, and measure to adapt to climate change in capture fisheries, and will serve as the foundation of a ‘smart fishing’ transition decade aiming to reduce emissions from fishing by up to 50%.

The session will cover topics (but not limited) on fishing gear and fishing vessel design and operation, new and efficiency engines and fuel types for fishing vessels, measures to monitor fuel use and emission, use of artificial intelligence for selective fishing and route optimization for fuel consumption reduction, and means to adapt to and mitigate climate change in fisheries.

Marine and coastal protected areas are at the forefront of impacts from climate change. There is an urgent need to assess climate change vulnerability systematically and rapidly. This session will incorporate existing tools used to evaluate the vulnerability of the values recognised within protected areas but also include assessments of the vulnerability to economic, social and cultural aspects of the associated community. Applications of climate change vulnerability assessments to all types of marine and coastal protected areas are welcome, including for locations recognised internationally (World Heritage, RAMSAR), nationally (national heritage/trust, MPAs) and locally (First Nations land/sea country, community-based).

Marine-dependent communities, particularly fishery-reliant communities, are especially vulnerable to the impacts of environmental variability and climate change. The inherent complexity of the marine environment, together with the uncertainty brought on by anthropogenic change, hampers decision-making at all scales, undermining adaptive capacity and resilience within communities. Inclusive transdisciplinary approaches are thus required to address existing vulnerabilities whilst building resilience to the effects of future changes on various system scales. In this session, we share case studies on how coastal communities can improve resilience to climate change by using diverse co-design and participatory approaches. We also aim to identify barriers and opportunities to develop adaptive capacity and resilience of vulnerable coastal communities through improved multi-scalar decision-making.

Over the last few decades, extreme climate events are interacting with longer-term climate change, leading to unprecedented environmental conditions for marine ecosystems and interconnected social systems across the globe. These events include rapid or episodic physical events (marine heatwaves, hurricanes, storm surge) as well as disequilibrium triggered by biological responses to changing climate (ocean acidification, HABs, bleaching). These changes have caused widespread impacts on marine ecosystems, including increased physiological stresses, mass mortalities of marine life, community spatial shifts and destruction of coastal biogenic habitats. Ecosystem changes have affected coupled social systems, altering human activities such as commercial fishing and subsistence harvest, and impacting livelihoods, communities, and cultures. Simultaneous occurrences of multiple climate extremes, termed compound events, have the capacity to exacerbate societal and environmental impacts beyond any extreme event in isolation, challenging the resilience of ecosystems and coastal communities. Near-term forecasting at seasonal, annual, and decadal timescales offers the potential to develop information that will enable ocean stakeholders and resource managers to better prepare for and respond to extreme events.

In this session, we encourage submissions related to climate extremes and associated compound events that: (1) improve understanding of the physical and biogeochemical processes of extreme events; (2) describe ecological and/or socio-economic consequences; (3) describe potential adaptation and management strategies that could mitigate these impacts, including those that advance forecasting of extreme and compound events.

This session will examine the intersection of deep-sea climate science, management, conservation, economics and governance. We invite contributions relevant to deep-ocean climate impacts, interface with human uses (e.g., energy, mining, fishing), climate adaptation, carbon services (storage and sequestration), and ocean-based climate interventions. Contributors from different disciplines (physical oceanography, chemistry, biology, social sciences) and approaches (modeling, observations, paleo studies, policy) are invited to think broadly about how their understanding of climate change in the deep ocean can inform actions going forward.

Nature-based Solutions (NBS) have been defined as “actions to protect, sustainably manage, and restore natural and modified ecosystems that address societal challenges effectively and adaptably, simultaneously providing human well-being and biodiversity benefits” by the IUCN. Implementing climate-ready NBS within marine habitats (i.e. restoration of habitat-forming species, establishment of marine protected areas, sustainably harvesting seafood) requires in-depth knowledge on the impacts of climate change on marine flora and fauna and the feedback processes whereby increasing ecosystem health and biodiversity reduce climate impacts. Contributions in this session will promote dialog on the relationships among NBS, climate change adaptation and mitigation, biodiversity and ecosystem services within marine social-ecological systems using real-world examples.

The effects of global climate change vary widely across ecosystems, and regional modeling frameworks are critical tools for evaluating impacts, risks, and the efficacy of management strategies. This session will highlight current approaches and identify critical gaps for coupling climate models to regional social-ecological systems. In particular, presentations on modeling efforts that integrate climate impacts across spatial scales, disciplines, and aim to generate near- to long-term projections are encouraged. The session will emphasize approaches to incorporate statistically or dynamically downscaled climate projections into single species, food web, and social-ecological projections and identify strategies to support climate-ready ecosystem-based management advice.

Fisheries provide income, jobs, food, and cultural connection to the oceans. Yet these systems are vulnerable to climate change, and are also influenced by broader ecological, socioeconomic, and governance dimensions. Pathways to reduce vulnerability and operationalise climate resilience within fisheries are often context-, scale-, and resource-dependent. Identifying and understanding opportunities, as well as challenges or trade-offs, to meeting these aims is critical for achieving global Sustainable Development Goals. This is particularly important for small scale fisheries, many of which remain economically and politically marginalised, are highly vulnerable to change, and remain invisible in policy debates. This session welcomes contributions that examine the diverse factors and conditions contributing to fisheries vulnerability and/or resilience, characterise ways fisheries are responding to climate change, and reflect on pathways that facilitate transitions from vulnerability to resilient and viable fisheries systems. We encourage case studies reflecting a range of fisheries contexts.

Many marine fish are shifting their horizontal and vertical distributions because of changing ocean conditions, with consequences for species interactions, assessments, management, and coastal economies. Mechanistic and statistical approaches developed to quantify distribution shifts still have unresolved challenges, which are both operational (model resolution, bias-correction, model parameterization and validation) and conceptual (ontogenetic constraints, non-stationarity, adaptive responses, depth gradients). In addition, further impacted spatial properties of marine species go beyond distribution shifts, including the population structure, early life dispersal, spatially-dependent critical processes, collective behavior, and spatial co-occurrence and interactions of species. We invite contributions that present advances in forecasting and projecting spatio-temporal dynamics of marine species, as well as advances in understanding climate change impacts on less investigated spatial properties.

The oceanic oxygen content continues to decline due to ocean warming and coastal eutrophication, with consequences for marine species, ecosystems, fisheries and biogeochemical cycles. Research investigating this has expanded rapidly in recent years, yielding major advances in identifying the drivers and consequences of ocean deoxygenation. This session will highlight recent progress in understanding the physical and biogeochemical mechanisms of ocean deoxygenation and its ecological and economic consequences in the coastal and open ocean. It aims at identifying knowledge gaps and stimulating cross-disciplinary discussions including with social sciences. This session provides a platform to highlight recent research and activities contributing to the Global Ocean Oxygen Decade, The United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development Programme, a roadmap of future ocean oxygen research needs and possible solution-based actions for the coming decade.

Central to being able to provide comprehensive assessments of change in the marine environment are two components. First, is the utilisation of multidisciplinary ocean observations for assessing marine environments comprehensively to establish their state and responses, including ongoing trends. Second, is the interpretation of multidisciplinary observations and associated products to provide information that can be utilised and applied to address management and policy needs. This session will discuss current and developing pathways, priority needs and future work for improving linkages between observation systems and decision making through the delivery of multidisciplinary ocean observations into marine assessments at multiple scales. Strategic topics addressed:

• Indicator-based frameworks for detecting and responding to climate impacts on ocean ecosystems
• Valuation and non-economic assessment of ecosystem services
• Data mobilisation and accessibility challenges and solutions

Regime shifts of marine ecosystems are increasingly observed in response to food production, coastal development and climate change, and abrupt changes are expected to occur even more frequently, if the anthropogenic perturbation remains unabated. Such abrupt shifts, associated with a substantial reorganisation between different states of ecosystem structure and functioning, may even be irreversible. Gradual, but also nonlinear changes, crossings of thresholds, and cascading effects associated with multiple stressors such as ocean warming, deoxygenation, or ocean acidification, but also other anthropogenic stressors such as overfishing, plastic contamination, pollution or eutrophication, can trigger abrupt changes and ecosystem-wide tipping points. The detectability of these abrupt shifts or tipping points is, however, limited due to nonlinear dynamics of ecological systems, complex interactions between the physical-chemical environments and biota, and species-dependent physiological tolerances to change. Moreover, the large natural variability of the system may obscure gradual changes from abrupt shifts. Yet, particularly for ecosystem management and governance, a better understanding of the likelihood of abrupt change is crucial.

In this session we invite contributions on all topics relating to interactions between multiple stressors that may lead to tipping points, abrupt shifts and cascading effects in marine ecosystems. We are particularly interested in various methodological approaches to detect nonlinearities, identify early warning signals for abrupt change, and define safe operating spaces to avoid critical tipping points in marine ecosystems, using both observational data and Earth System Models.

Warmer waters and retreating sea ice allows marine populations and human activities to extend northwards, introducing multiple pressures acting in synergy on Arctic coastal and oceanic ecosystems. This comes in addition to the long-range transport of contaminants bioaccumulated and biomagnified in the food chain. It is imperative to develop risk assessments that take into account not only changes in the structure and function of marine ecosystems induced by climate change, but also new initiatives to utilize Arctic marine ecosystem services, including living and non-living marine resource, shipping and tourism. A prerequisite for assessing risks is to understand processes linking drivers to effects and to combine experiments, in situ and remote data collection and numerical ecosystem models to link effects at the individual level to impacts on populations and ecosystems. The session invites contributions focusing broadly on impacts of multiple pressures, including climate change, on key Arctic marine species, ecosystems and ecosystem services.

To maintain resilience of fish populations under climate change and limit sociological and economic impacts, future fishery management advice needs to be robust to uncertainty in climate-driven fisheries responses. The focus of this session will be on the use of management strategy evaluation (MSE) to assess robustness of current and novel, climate-ready fishery management strategies in a changing ocean. In addition to MSEs, we welcome contributions on methodological advances in stock assessment and operating models to simulate climate-driven changes in distribution, fleet dynamics, productivity, and food-web interactions, including but not limited to, spatially explicit models, multi-species models, and environmentally-enhanced stock assessments. We also encourage presentations highlighting the use of ecosystem indicators to directly inform harvest control rules and dynamic spatial management strategies.

Climate change is restructuring ocean ecosystems and creating new challenges and opportunities for marine resource dependent individuals, communities, and industries. Novel environmental conditions increasingly necessitate management intervention in order to protect essential habitat, ensure resources sustainability, and reduce bycatch and other human wildlife conflicts. Critical in ensuring effective climate adaptation and the equitable distribution of associated costs and benefits will be measuring the response of individuals, communities, and industries to ecosystem changes and the policies enacted to manage them. This session will discuss how socio-economic impacts can be measured and effectively communicated and how policies and interventions can be designed with equity across different resource user and stakeholder groups in mind. It will highlight the ever-expanding suite of tools available to fisheries managers and practitioners and discuss their relative suitability and success with addressing different objectives in diverse human and ecological contexts, and evaluate the implications of their use for different resource user and stakeholder groups.

The scientific community has recognized that the marine environment is a social-ecological system and that climate change alters human relationships with the biophysical environment. Social scientists have increasingly focused on understanding how climate change impacts human communities and their resource use so that local, national, and global adaptation and mitigation efforts can effectively address the needs of diverse stakeholders. We invite quantitative and qualitative presentations that couple social and economic modeling and research with integrated biophysical climate modeling efforts. We especially welcome work about when global approaches such as shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) are appropriate versus when local approaches are necessary or effective.

Recent reports suggest that carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is required to stabilize global temperatures following the Paris Climate Accords. The oceans, as one of the largest natural carbon sinks, are an ideal option for this removal, however, there are significant hurdles to overcome. This session will discuss the current natural science gaps in ocean CDR techniques (e.g., alkalinity enhancement, ocean fertilization), in addition to the economic, social science and governance knowledge required to ensure efficiency and effectiveness of CDR approaches (including blue carbon) and cooperation between diverse stakeholders and sectors in providing ocean-based solutions to tackle climate change.

The United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development Programme “Ocean Acidification Research for Sustainability (OARS)” will provide ocean acidification (OA) data and evidence, identify data and evidence needs for mitigation and adaptation, co-design and implement observation strategies, and increase understanding of OA impacts to protect marine life, by 2030. To ensure its success, OARS will require collaboration across the global OA community, spearheaded by OARS “co-champions” to coordinate these efforts. This session invites contributions that highlight activities addressing the 7 outcomes of OARS, such as OA biogeochemical and biological observations, data management, projections, capacity development and science-policy efforts. More about OARS

Duration: 1-day workshop

UPDATED DESCRIPTION (Feb. 7, 2023)

Assessing vulnerability to climate change of cultural and natural heritage within marine and coastal areas (and beyond) begins with a clear definition of the objectives and the desired characteristics and implementation components of the assessment process. This workshop seeks to draw upon applications of climate vulnerability assessment tools and reflections by participants who have undertaken these. By sharing lessons learned, and benefits and limitations of different approaches, the workshop will seek to provide guidance for future applications and practitioners on how to effectively assess climate vulnerability – and how to work out what to do in response to help marine and coastal areas better cope with climate change. Implementing actions to reduce vulnerability can be affected by political and fiscal realities but can also benefit from broader perspectives across practitioner networks, which also require guidance and/or maintenance.

The outcomes of this workshop will be developed for a submission to an intended special issue of the journal Heritage, entitled “Assessing Impacts of Climate Change on Cultural and Natural Heritage”. Presenters in Session 3 will be encouraged to submit manuscripts to this special issue.

Duration: 1-day workshop

The UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030) addresses challenges associated with ecosystem health, food security, and climate change through synergistic programs, including SmartNet (network to advance and share scientific understanding of marine ecosystems); SUPREME (advance ocean forecasts and projections to guide climate-informed resource management); FishSCORE (sustain fisheries, protect ocean ecosystems, and enhance equitable benefits); Marine Life 2030 (coordination to deliver actionable knowledge of ocean life and ecosystem restoration); and ECOP (empower early career ocean professionals and incorporate new thinking into ocean sustainability and stewardship). Workshop participants will learn about these and other Decade programmes, share knowledge and capacity, establish collaborative networks to advance Ocean Decade goals, and co-design transformative actions for the climate-fisheries nexus.

Duration: 2/3-day workshop

Past climates provide useful analogues with which to understand and predict the long-term impact of anthropogenic climate change on marine ecosystems, e.g., ecosystems in warm greenhouse climates and during periods of rapid environmental change. There is a varied toolbox of methods ranging from micropalaeontology, organic geochemistry to numerical modelling - each providing unique insights into aspects of past plankton ecosystems but which are not yet fully integrated. This workshop invites researchers from different disciplines to collaborate on identifying: how we can best combine different methods; the spatial/ecological/biogeochemical resolution that is needed/available to reconstruct past ecosystems; key quantities and concepts of past plankton ecosystems to assess their sensitivity to environmental change (e.g., resilience).

Duration: 1-day workshop

Ensembles of coupled climate-marine ecosystem models have great potential to illustrate risks of global change and vulnerabilities of marine species and human communities and industries. These models are expected to inform the Seventh Assessment Report (AR7) of the IPCC and local efforts such as the (US) National Climate Assessment. A grand challenge of such ecological ensembles is grappling with uncertainty, in particular structural uncertainty stemming from alternate ecological parameterization of responses to temperature, oxygen, and pH. In this workshop we will apply a global ensemble of 7+ Atlantis ecosystem models, built on a common modeling framework and code base. We aim to engage the broader ECCWO community to collectively inform ecological parameterization of metabolic and spatial movement responses to climate change. Our goal is to identify future trends in regional ecosystem responses likely to stem from standardized, downscaled ocean projections.

Duration: 1-day workshop

Marine ecosystems are increasingly impacted by multiple climate change and non-climate stressors that are pushing some systems and species towards or past tipping points (critical points where a small change in a pressure or driver can induce a disproportionate change in system dynamics). The goal of this workshop is to draw upon recent PICES and ICES working group efforts to synthesize findings and outputs from recent integrated modeling projects across the globe. In particular, the workshop will review evidence and case studies for historical and future tipping points and thresholds in marine ecosystems to help support climate-informed management advice.