Ocean-Climate Guide to Action

In 2015 at COP21, nearly 200 countries adopted the Paris Agreement. Parties to this historic accord committed to take steps both to limit warming to well under 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels and to increase resilience to the impacts of climate change. Healthy oceans are a crucial component in the global fight against climate change, but only a handful of countries currently include meaningful ocean-based mitigation and adaptation actions in their plans to meet their Paris goals.

This Ocean-Climate Guide to Action provides options for addressing this omission, which carries a heavy cost. Globally, ocean-based economic activities are estimated to be worth over a trillion dollars annually (USD), supporting hundreds of millions of jobs and providing protein to billions of people.1 More fundamentally, our oceans provide services that make life on earth possible, such as producing oxygen and storing excess heat and carbon dioxide, thereby slowing the rate of catastrophic warming. The oceans are critical to the global fight against climate change.

Read the Ocean-Climate Guide to Action here.