The Issue
A Changing Ocean
The West Coast is experiencing significant ocean and coastal change. Rising sea surface temperatures, ocean acidification and hypoxia, harmful algal blooms, habitat loss, shifting species ranges, sea-level rise, and coastal erosion are reshaping ecosystems across California, Oregon, and Washington.
These changes affect more than just the ocean. They impact coastal infrastructure, public health, local economies, and the many ways that people connect and depend on healthy coastal and marine systems. As ocean conditions continue to change, resource managers and communities will need to make increasingly complex decisions in the face of new challenges and uncertainty.
Meeting these challenges and making sound, durable decisions depends on continued investment in science.
Why Is This Difficult to Solve?
The West Coast has no shortage of ocean science expertise or organizations working to address these challenges. The difficulty lies in understanding where our science needs overlap and where coordinated action and investment could create the greatest regional benefit for the greatest number of people.
1) Ocean Challenges Extend Beyond State Boundaries
The West Coast is connected by the California Current System, which drives many of the physical, chemical, and biological processes that shape our coasts and oceans. This shared ocean circulation and seasonal upwelling influence ocean temperatures, nutrient availability, marine productivity, and the distribution of species across state boundaries. As a result, many of the challenges facing coastal communities are not only regional in their drivers, but in their impacts as well. While management decisions are often made at the local, state, or tribal level, the scientific information and infrastructure needed to support those decisions are shared regionally.
2) Science Priorities are Fragmented Across Organizations and Jurisdictions
State and federal agencies, Tribes, coastal communities, and academic institutions have already invested significant time and expertise in identifying the science needed to understand and respond to ocean change. However, those needs are dispersed across strategic directions, management plans, research agendas, and other planning efforts. Rather than creating a new set of priorities, there is an opportunity and a need to build on this collective body of literature by identifying where independent efforts converge on the same regional science needs.
3) Not Every Science Priority Is Captured in Existing Plans
Existing planning documents identify many of the science needs facing the West Coast, but they cannot fully capture the pace of a changing ocean. As conditions continue to change, so do the questions facing resource managers leaving some of the future’s most important science needs yet to be formally articulated. Convening partners from across the West Coast creates space to identify these emerging priorities alongside those that have already been documented in existing plans.
The West Coast Lacks a Unified Understanding of Its Shared Science Needs
The challenge is not identifying ocean problems. The challenge is identifying the science needs we share and bringing them together so that we make speak in a unified voice on what the West Coast needs most.
