Climate change is a massive issue which the European Commission will address via the ‘Green Deal’ – an ambitions plan to reach climate neutrality by 2050. This involves all society with ocean users being key given the strong control the ocean exerts over atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) by taking up ca. 30% of CO2 emissions. In parallel, ocean biological processes, mainly the sinking and interior decomposition of surface produced organic matter, separately store enough CO2 to keep atmospheric CO2 much lower than in an abiotic ocean. Conventionally we believe that the biological term has been unchanged by human activities. However, the current and future scale of human activities such as fishing, mining, trawling, dredging and drilling are potentially so large that this assumption is questionable. Based on this context OceanICU aims to:
1. Define the baseline of ocean C uptake occurring now against which change can be judged. Currently the Global Carbon Budget (GCB) shows a large offset between ocean C uptake estimated from data and numerical models. Our focus is on comparing surface uptake and interior accumulation to add a further estimate to our understanding.
2. Evaluating the strength and operation of key biological processes that are susceptible to climate change and disruption by human activities. These will then be incorporated into a range of numerical models. Climate sensitive processes are those impacted by acidification, deoxygenation and warming. Our focus around human impacts is on the role of fish and multicellular organisms in the carbon cycle because these are susceptible to human intervention via biomass removal (fishing) and sediment injection into the water column (mining).
3. Use this new information to generate tools that will allow policy makers, industrialists and wider society to assess the effects of resource extraction on the ocean C cycle. A particular focus is creating 'Decision Support Tools’ or DSTs as key practical resources that will allow regulators and industrial partners to evaluate the impact of their actions on the ocean C cycle.