Ocean Visions Summit: Day One

mCDR researchers and practitioners gathered in Vancouver, BC this week for the biennial Ocean Visions Summit.

By Sarah Schumann

The Ocean Visions Summit kicked off in Vancouver, British Columbia this morning with some sobering reminders. Ninety percent of man-made global warming is occurring in the ocean. Forty percent of sea ice has been lost, ocean waters are losing oxygen and becoming more acidic, vertical mixing is weakening, storms are becoming more powerful, and marine life is migrating poleward.

Many conference participants believe that solutions are possible—and that the ocean itself can play a big role in reversing the climate crisis. But developing and deploying these solutions won’t be easy.

I came here on a reconnaissance mission to understand one particular set of ocean climate solutions: those categorized as marine carbon dioxide removal, or mCDR. mCDR methods, which are diverse, aim to enhance the ocean’s natural pathways for drawing down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Methods include ocean alkalinity enhancement, direct ocean capture, seaweed culture and sinking, ocean fertilization, and enhanced upwelling and downwelling. All are in the research stage at present, and there are still many questions about their efficacy, scalability, and ecological and social impacts.  

In recent weeks, I’ve been facilitating a series of virtual roundtables with commercial fishermen across Alaska, the West Coast, and the Northeast, focused on fleshing out initial principles of a concept we are calling “fishery sensitive mCDR”—that is, mCDR that is designed from the get-go with the wellbeing of fishery ecosystems and communities in mind.

With participating fishermen’s concerns and questions fresh in my mind, I came to the Ocean Visions Summit to find out: who is leading the charge on mCDR, how fast the field is moving, and what key governance and engagement onramps exist for injecting fishing community priorities into the conversation.  

I also came to make fishermen’s voices heard. As far as I can tell, I’m the only fisherman at the Summit. The fishing community’s lack of representation makes my being here all the more important, and I’m determined to make fisheries front and center in every conversation I have.

The present state of mCDR

In the morning, I attended a session titled “The state of mCDR: Where are we on the road to actionable information?” which featured a panel of four trendsetters in the mCDR space—a funder, a buyer, a scientist, and a policy adviser.  

All four panelists shared a desire to move mCDR research forward as fast as possible, and expressed a view that this can be done responsibly.

Frauke Kracke from Frontier, a company that bundles advance purchases for mCDR, maintained that enough research has already been done to understand the conditions and thresholds under which mCDR activities can be deployed safely. In particular, Kracke highlighted the value of abiotic mCDR approaches such as ocean alkalinity enhancement and direct ocean capture, explaining that these methods offer unlimited capacity to store carbon dioxide in seawater as stable carbonate and bicarbonate molecules.

Nonetheless, panelists emphasized the need for a gated approach that includes “stop triggers” or “kill switches”, to ensure that mCDR development does not get out ahead of the current state of knowledge and that there are mechanisms in place to put the genie back in the bottle if necessary.

After downplaying the extent of scientific unknowns, panel participants dwelled extensively on another source of uncertainty: recent federal funding freezes and cuts to agency staff in the U.S. by President Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Under the Biden administration, mCDR research gained significant traction, as evident in the formation of a White House-sponsored Fast Track Action Committee on mCDR and the allocation of over $60 million in federal funding to support research. Although the Trump administration’s attitude towards mCDR is not yet clear, DOGE’s firing of several key agency staff and the general chaos surrounding federal science funding in the U.S. is leading mCDR researchers and practitioners to strategize about alternative pathways to keep their work going.

“The need for CDR has not disappeared,” said Marc von Keitz of the Grantham Foundation, a philanthropic organization which has funded mCDR research and education. “It has only gotten bigger and more urgent.” The field, von Keitz said, “has been thrown into a significant amount of disarray… No one knows where all this is settling down,” and recent federal firings are “destroying critical human infrastructure.”

“The early signs from this [U.S.] administration,” Kracke added, “would suggest that there is at least a very treacherous path forward, if any path at all.”

Philanthropists like the Grantham Foundation cannot possibly replace the role of federal funding, von Keitz explained. The catalytic power of philanthropic funding lies in unlocking federal funding by providing non-federal match, not by supplanting federal funding altogether.

One solution, panelists mused, is for other countries to step into the gap. Climate change is a global problem, and mCDR technologies can be developed anywhere, so headwinds in one country create opportunities for others to step in and capitalize. Audience participants shared a view that other countries would welcome recently terminated U.S. scientists with open arms.

Where is the field going from here?

In the afternoon, I attended an interactive session called “Toward a shared strategy to advance mCDR pathways to climate relevant scales by 2030,” led by the Meridian Institute, a nonprofit consultancy contracted by Ocean Visions to collect stakeholder input for an mCDR Collective Strategy Initiative.

The discussion centered around a key riddle: Should the mCDR field start by putting in place enabling conditions for mCDR, by front-loading things like community engagement, social license, strong governance mechanisms, and coordination across sectors and governments? Or should the field start with at-sea research experiments to answer key scientific questions and inform subsequent decision-making? Or thirdly, should the field do “everything all at once”?

An audience poll showed that an even number of participants favored each option. My own vote was for the first option: putting enabling conditions before at-sea trials, but my table-mates made convincing arguments for the other options, too.

Key takeaways 

Throughout my first day at the Ocean Visions Summit, I kept hearing the phrase “field building.” I had to look it up. According to Google AI, field building is a collaborative approach that involves coordinating actors across a social change field to achieve population-level impact by strengthening organizations, connections, and knowledge sharing. 

Effectively, all of the sessions here—as well as the coffee breaks and the welcome reception at Vancouver’s Science Centre—are about field building for mCDR. The 400 people from 37 countries assembled here, who span science, policy, and the private sector, represent a significant portion of the mCDR field, and their three days together in Vancouver this week are a step forward for relationship-building and knowledge sharing that can drive momentum even in the face of stark political uncertainty.

But if this is field building, then what are the long-term implications of the fact that there’s only a single commercial fisherman (me) present among the participants?

As the Summit continues into its second and third days, I’ll continue to ponder this question—and I’ll let you know what I conclude.