Some 550 experts from 86 countries have spent almost five years compiling a 1600-page assessment detailing the challenges the ocean faces. This scientific guide delivers the knowledge humankind needs to protect and sustain the planet. It’s called the World Ocean Assessment, and here’s what those 1600 pages reveal.
The ocean matters to everyone, everywhere
The ocean shapes everyone’s daily life even if they do not live in coastal zones. It stabilizes the climate by absorbing most of the planet’s excess heat as well as damaging greenhouse gases. Without its cooling effect, more extreme weather can be expected which will threaten food systems and supply chains, and insurance markets.
It serves as food supply. When fish stocks collapse or supply chains break due to climate impacts or illegal fishing, prices rise, not just for seafood, but for many foods that rely on global trade and coastal economies. It provides mental and physical health benefits, medicines, and a significant share of breathable oxygen. The ocean supports trillions of dollars in global trade, tourism, and jobs.
The ocean is under intensifying stress
Humans are reshaping marine ecosystems. The global population reached 8.2 billion in 2024, with 37 per cent of those people living within 100 km of the coast. A shirtless man stands in the doorway of his flooded tin-roofed home in a coastal village in the Sundarbans, India, surrounded by floodwaters from sea level rise and cyclones.
Inevitably, this has concentrated human and economic activity in vulnerable coastal zones, increasing the extraction of natural resources, infrastructure expansion, waste discharge, and habitat degradation. At the same time, offshore development is intensifying, with wind farms, deepwater oil infrastructure, and expanding seabed cables and pipelines altering habitats farther from shore.
Climate change is transforming conditions
Data relating to ocean warming and sea level rise is dramatic. The rate of sea level rise, due to melting ice caps and temperature-driven water expansion, has doubled from up to1.9 mm/year before 2015 to 4.3 mm/year in 2023. Arctic temperatures are rising four times faster than the global average. Hypoxic (or dead) zones, where oxygen levels are so low that most marine life cannot survive, now span 4.5 million km².16 per cent of the total increase in ocean temperatures since 1955 has occurred after 2018.
Source: The UN
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