2022 SOST Opportunities and Actions Roundtable Submissions
Summary: Fish, squids, and other organisms that live at mid-water depths — an area known as the “Ocean Twilight Zone” — mediate one of the largest fluxes of carbon on Earth, moving somewhere between 3.3 and 12.8 Gt CO2e per year from the surface ocean to deep waters and bottom sediments where the carbon can be sequestered for centuries. Though estimates of the carbon flux through this Zone are highly uncertain, even the quantities at the lower range of available estimates are commensurate with the scale of annual national fossil fuel emissions by the United States and other developed countries in the Global North. Although very few fisheries for these species yet exist, some countries are already developing the technologies to commercially target and process them into feeds for the world’s burgeoning aquaculture industry. In a series of cutting-edge, EDF-hosted workshops focused on innovating blue carbon solutions in the open ocean, experts determined that large-scale fishing on these species could “short circuit” the global carbon cycle at gigaton scales. But because the Ocean Twilight Zone is one of the least-understood environments on the planet, exactly how fishing might impact these species’ role in carbon storage is unknown.
We see an urgent, interagency science need to expand, link and scale emergent NSF- and NOAA-funded efforts to quantify the role of mesopelagic species in the carbon cycle and investigate novel management and governance pathways that will be needed to ensure these species continue to provide important ecosystem services to people and nature. Specifically, there is an opportunity to 1) characterize spatial variability of midwater carbon flux to identify priority regions of US EEZ and global oceans where these species play the most important role in carbon sequestration; and 2) bring together scientists across disciplines to develop ocean models that can simulate how various levels of fishing effort would impact the midwater carbon cycle. Such experiments can inform whether and how these species could be fished without compromising carbon sequestration and other important ecological services provided by the mesopelagic system and inform spatial planning efforts for prioritizing regions to protect midwater species for their role in blue carbon storage solutions. Moreover, this research could be synergistic with the mapping of US EEZ resources under NOMEC.
Sector: NGO
Organization: Environmental Defense Fund
POC: Julia Mason, jmason@edf.org
Other Contacts: Jamie Collins, jcollins@edf.org; Kristin Kleisner, kkleisner@edf.org; Rod
Fujita, rfujita@edf.org