Oceans cover more than two thirds of Earth’s surface. They are home to millions of species, provide a key source of protein to people on every continent, and play an enormous role in regulating our planet’s climate, water cycle and more. They also are facing tremendous disruption from human action, from altered temperature and circulation to overfishing to acidification to plastic pollution. What kind of oceans will we pass along to future generations of humans and other living things? The answer to that question starts with two others: What kind of oceans would we like to pass along? And what would it take to do so? For this fourth installment of our Envision 2050 series (read the first three here), Ensia asked seven individuals with special connections to the ocean to share their hopes for the world’s oceans — and what it would take to achieve them. Here are their responses: Margaret Leinen: Keep Learning Director, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego Put simply, the oceans are key to the future of our planet and its health. My hope is that by 2050 we can all look back and say that in 2015 we began to make the serious changes necessary to address — and even reverse — the challenges facing the oceans: pollution, rising seas, ocean warming, oxygen depletion, and acidification, to name a few. These issues are not isolated in their reach. The food and precious resources the oceans provide to global society have been bountiful, but we see them diminishing. We must act strategically going forward. It serves all of us, as a global society, to maintain the stability of the oceans as a natural system. My colleagues at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, and across the oceanographic and earth science communities have employed instruments and observation networks to explore the oceans and track the troubling trends afflicting the ocean’s habitats, from coral reefs in decline to low-oxygen zones that choke out productive ecosystems. One urgent area of concern is the world’s rising seas. No longer an issue isolated to far-off island nations, sea-level … Continue reading Envision 2050: The future of oceans