The Center for Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation is pleased to announce the Ocean Visions Joint Initiative, a forum to discuss and develop the science and engineering knowledge-base that enable solutions and promote optimism. The Center joins four other esteemed partners in creating this initiative including Georgia Tech’s Program in Ocean Science and Engineering, Smithsonian Ocean Portal, and Stanford University’s Center for Ocean Solution and Woods Institute for the Environment.
“Ocean Visions will create a concrete pathway for scientists and engineers, to design and execute research that enables ocean-based solutions.”
– Emanuele Di Lorenzo, Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology
Our ocean landscape is changing and not uniformly in a bad way. Every day we see new and positive trends and accomplishments among the challenges. With these sparks of hope we have the opportunity to move away from only doom and gloom messages about the ocean and embrace a new phase of ocean optimism. Every day we see the implementation of solutions that are helping us to adapt and mitigate human and climate-related pressures and to sustainably use ocean resources. Most members of the general public, policymakers, ocean scientists and engineers, and even some conservation professionals are unaware of the extent of positive actions and the wealth of opportunities of what could be accomplished in the near-term based on existing efforts and initiatives. Given this gap, there is a growing need to better coordinate and integrate various scientific fields with engineering to help better coordinate existing efforts for great impact and generate new knowledge and innovative approaches for long-term sustainable solutions for ocean health.
Goals of Ocean Visions Initiative
- Develop a forum where scientists and engineers can discuss and exchange their
research in the context of ocean solutions. - Generate an integrated knowledge in the peer-review literature of the science and
engineering that informs and enables ocean solutions. - Highlight the social and natural sciences, and engineering that enable interdisciplinary approaches to ocean solutions.
- Raises awareness and inspire the next generation of ocean experts and leaders.
- Engage with stakeholders to support co-production of research and results that help maintain a dialogue with end users and inform scientists and engineers on how their research can contribute to solutions.
Upcoming Activities and Events
- A special issue in Frontier of Marine Science on Successes at the Interface of Ocean,
Climate and Humans. Learn more here - The first OceanVisions’19 – Climate summit on Successes in resilience, adaptation,
mitigation, and sustainability at Georgia Tech, April 1-4, 2019 - The launch of the new Ocean Tethys Award on April 1, 2019. Inaugural recipient is Dr.
Jane Lubchenco, past head of NOAA and marine science advisor to the US President,
and Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University - Uncommon Dialogue at Stanford University for an open discussion with stakeholders on example of ocean solutions that are scalable, September 2019.
Learn more about the Ocean Visions Initiative here.