The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) announced a $25 million gift to support ocean-based climate solutions from the chair of the Institution’s board of trustees, Paul Salem. This gift comes as it has been the warmest year on record and faces the possibility of rapid and unregulated efforts to mitigate climate change.
Salem’s commitment built on the momentum generated by recent gifts and grants to WHOI researchers from federal, corporate, and private sources and brought the total funding received by WHOI over the past three years for ocean and climate research to over $85 million. A growing focus of these efforts is the advancement of environmental monitoring, reporting, and verification (eMRV) capabilities to keep pace with a booming market for carbon credits – some of which rely on carbon capture by the ocean.
Existing ocean-based solutions could account for over one-third of the interventions needed to avoid exceeding the 2°C warming threshold in the Paris Climate Agreement. Methods that leverage the ocean’s chemical and biological processes could, if proven and deployed at scale, supplement these efforts, but only if humanity also rapidly cuts greenhouse gas emissions.
The recent funding announcements signal a long overdue shift in attention to the ocean’s role in addressing climate change. And last year’s U.N. Climate Conference in Dubai, COP28, saw nearly $500 million in new ocean and climate-related funding commitments from sources including Bezos Earth Fund and the Ocean Resilience and Climate Alliance (ORCA) — a new consortium of climate and ocean institutions announced by Bloomberg Philanthropies at the COP28 Ocean Pavilion—to advance ocean-based climate solutions and ensure the health and vitality of the ocean.
Along with Salem’s gift, recent funding from the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP), and gifts from individuals, foundations, and corporations will support a growing ecosystem of fundamental and applied scientific research and engineering development at WHOI. And these build on existing capabilities such as the National Science Foundation-funded Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) and the international Argo network of autonomous profiling floats. Funding from Salem, NOPP, DOE and other sources expand on these existing programs in part by supporting investigations of new marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) projects such as ocean alkalinity enhancement and ocean iron fertilization, and by building networks that incorporate machine learning, AI, and data systems to track and verify mCDR efforts.
KEY QUOTES:
“There is a tidal wave of ‘blue carbon’ solutions to climate change on the horizon, some proven, but most completely novel and in need of testing to investigate their safety and effectiveness. The ocean can help us avert a climate crisis, but we need to also ensure the long-term health of marine ecosystems and the communities that rely on ocean resources. This far-sighted gift will help us stay ahead of what is already a billion-dollar industry and inject some much-needed reality into the carbon market.”
“We urgently need the science to ensure this can be done safely at scale. We’re humbled by the generosity and foresight of Paul’s gift, and grateful for all the support we’ve received to ensure that science will lead the race for solutions to our global climate crisis.”
— WHOI President and Director Peter de Menocal
“I am very pleased that my commitment will accelerate efforts by WHOI to improve humanity’s vital understanding of the ocean. More than two-thirds of our planet is ocean and, so if we want to solve climate change, we must invest in innovative ocean-based solutions that give us more eyes in the ocean in order to help us meet this generational challenge. WHOI is uniquely positioned to play a leading role in efforts to do exactly this.”
— Paul Salem
