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What do multidisciplinary ocean solutions look like?

The ocean provides food and jobs valued at $2.5 trillion dollars each year, making it the seventh largest economy in the world. Unfortunately, ocean health has been declining as climate change impacts threaten critical ocean ecosystems, overfishing pushes stocks past the point of recovery, millions of tons of plastic pollute the ocean every year and coastal dead zones continue to increase. Finding solutions to these pressing challenges is more urgent than ever.

In a continued effort to address these challenges, participants from this year’s Ocean Visions Initiativecollaborated on a special collection of peer-reviewed articles in the journal Frontiers of Marine Sciences, highlighting innovative technology that has successfully advanced solutions at the ocean, climate and human interface.

This collection brings together analyses of the some of the most important successes achieved or in progress, in the areas of adaptation, mitigation, biodiversity and sustainable development. It contains research by several Stanford authors, including:

These publications deepen the original aim of the Ocean Visions Initiative, by developing an integrated knowledge base of the natural and social sciences and engineering that enable ocean solutions. “To manage emerging ocean uses and unprecedented levels of ocean impact from climate change, overfishing and pollution, we need new tools to anticipate tipping points, and identify management and policy options for avoiding such catastrophic shifts,” said Fio Micheli, co-director of Stanford’s Center for Ocean Solutions and editor for this special issue. Additional editors include Chris Field, Director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment; Nancy Knowlton of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History; and Emanuele di Lorenzo of the Georgia Institute of Technology. “These publications are an exciting opportunity to share a knowledge base that enables such ocean solutions and showcase what works,” adds Micheli.

The Ocean Visions Initiative is a collaborative effort co-organized by Stanford University's Center for Ocean Solutions and Woods Institute for the Environment, the Smithsonian Ocean Portal, Georgia Tech's Ocean Science and Engineering Program and the Scripps Center for Climate Impacts and Adaptation, was created to specifically highlight current and past successful ocean initiatives while driving the movement forward.

Fiorenza Micheli is the David & Lucile Packard Professor in Marine Sciences at Hopkins Marine Station, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and co-director of the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions.
Chris Field is the Perry L. McCarty Director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies at Stanford University.

Read the special issue >

Learn more about the Ocean Visions Initiative >

Learn more about our work managing ocean risk >

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