A multi-stressor approach to understanding climate change impacts on coastal communities

Summary: Climate change, and its effects on the ocean and coastal communities, is a massive, multi-sectoral and multidisciplinary problem that cannot be addressed by any one agency or community. The interactions of multiple environmental stressors acting in unison, such as marine heat waves, harmful algal blooms, ocean acidification, and hypoxia, cascade throughout the water column and food web with detrimental and often irreversible impacts on marine life. We would like to take action on the recommendations of a workshop organized by the NOAA Ocean Acidification Program (OAP) and the NOAA National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS) Competitive Research Program in August 11 - 13, 2020 to identify research and monitoring priorities surrounding Ocean Acidification (OA) and Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs). The workshop summary highlighted the need for future funding to address OA as an interacting multiple stressor with climate change impacts. The Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) is already poised to deliver on many of the specific recommendations and solutions from the workshop, including vulnerability/risk assessments of combined OA/HAB impacts, maps and identification of "hot spots" (both static/current conditions and forward-looking), dashboards offering data access with both OA and HAB parameters, warnings and bulletins with identification of thresholds, evaluation of recovery/mitigation strategies and scenario analyses of effects of management actions. We propose to use the Integrated Ocean Observing Committee (IOOC) as a convening body for a follow-on workshop to design a process to broaden the use of imaging technologies and coastal modeling to observe, detect, predict and respond to ecological change, given the multivariate data collection and operational modeling framework established by the IOOS enterprise. This builds on a broader portfolio of effort within IOOS that creates a unique setting for building public-private partnerships and addressing the needs of 17 federal agencies, which integrates data, information and capabilities from individual and various organizations to federally accredited systems and onward to the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS).

Sector: Academia, boundary organization, non-profit, interagency
Organization: Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System + IOOS Association
POC: Clarissa Anderson, clrander@ucsd.edu
Other Contacts: Josie Quintrell, josie@ioosassociation.org