Biodiversity offsets, as the last stage of the mitigation hierarchy, provide an opportunity to promote a more sustainable basis for development by addressing residual impacts and achieving “no net loss” for biodiversity. Despite debate around their effectiveness, biodiversity offsets are seeing increasing application on land but remain a rarely used tool in the marine environment. In this paper, we assess how offsets can be applied in the marine environment to achieve better biodiversity outcomes, and identify implications for conservation policy and practice.

Developing shared goals within interdisciplinary marine research teams can enhance success, both in terms of knowledge production processes, and efforts to link that knowledge to decision-making processes. However, there is very little guidance available for how best to develop shared goals that reflect the values and perspectives of all team members. In a new Perspective Paper just published in One Earth, Chris Cvitanovic and colleagues explore the utility of an organisational psychology model – the ASPIRe model – for developing shared goals within interdisciplinary marine research teams. They do so by applying the model to the Centre for Marine Socioecology in Tasmania, Australia – a group that brings together marine experts from a number of organisations and with varied disciplinary expertise including physics, law, economics, biology, sociology and governance. The full paper is Open Access and can be found here

We are very pleased to announce that we are now accepting applications for the 7^th IMBeR 'Climate and Ecosystems' Summer School that will be held at UBC in Vancouver, Canada from 17-21 August 2020.

Numbers are limited to between 60-70 ClimEco7 participants to ensure good discussions and interactions between participants and the amazing lecturers. So when you apply, tell us why you should be selected to attend. We look forward to receiving applications from a wide range of ocean science disciplines.

The registration fee is still to be confirmed. No payment is necessary at this stage. Successful applicants will be informed of the deadline for payments later.

Last week, Carol Robinson, the Chair of the IMBeR Scientific Steering Committee, joined the IMBeR project office staff - John Claydon and Lisa Maddison from the International Project Office in Norway, and Fang Zuo and Kai Qin from the Regional Project Office in China - at a ceremony to mark the inauguration of the new International Project Office (IPO) in Shanghai, China.

A Memorandum of Understanding to support the IMBeR IPO-China for the next five years was signed by Carol Robinson and the ECNU President Prof. Qian Xuhong. The office is also supported by a consortium of supporting marine institutions and projects.

Research by the CLIOTOP Marine Predator Isotopes Task Team was recently published in Global Change Biology. The study compiled more than 5000 stable isotope values from 2000 to 2015 of three tuna species sampled globally. Their analyses, unprecedented in scope and spatial range, found a decline in tuna δ13C values of up to 2.5‰ which was up to five-fold larger than expected from the Suess effect alone, i.e. fossil fuel-derived and isotopically-light carbon incorporated into marine food webs. The team used time-series analysis and Bayesian modelling to relate the observed temporal trend to various processes known to influence ocean carbon cycling in the global oceans. The study concluded that tuna isotope signatures are not only indicating changes in fossil-fuel derived carbon emissions but also a substantial shift in phytoplankton communities (from a likely dominance of larger diatoms to smaller coccolithophorids, flagellates or cyanobacteria).

More than 90% of the heat associated with global warming, and more than 30% of the fossil-fuel carbon emissions have been absorbed by the oceans. While such processes are predicted to impact marine biota through changes in ocean stratification and ocean acidification, current estimates of trends are based on localized ocean time series or satellite observations with significant uncertainties.

The findings from this CLIOTOP study could have broad ramifications for marine food webs. Such shifts in phytoplankton could decrease the availability of energy and some essential macro and micro nutrients to fish and human consumers. The study represents a heretofore unrecognized application of stable isotope analyses to reveal decadal changes in the ocean carbon cycle. Such empirical data will be invaluable in calibrating and validating global earth system models used by the IPCC to project the effects of climate change on oceanic productivity.

The 2019 “global carbon budget” was published on 4 December. It provides an assessment of anthropogenic CO_² emissions and their distribution in the atmosphere, ocean, and land. This is important to better understand the global carbon cycle, support the development of climate policies, and project future climate change. It shows that emissions are still increasing, but have slowed due to the global decrease in coal burning. Continued and increased global action is needed to reverse the trends.

Global carbon budget 2019 by Pierre Friedlingstein et al. is licensed under CC BY 4.0