Ocean Visions Summit, Day Three: What’s Next?
The Vancouver waterfront
By Sarah Schumann
The final day of the Ocean Visions finished with a plenary session where panelists and audience members took turns at the mic to reflect on the three-day experience and share their visions for what comes next. A number of these comments focused on the fourth pillar of the Ocean Visions network’s agenda to confront the ocean-climate crisis: Reach. Ocean Visions recently added its “Reach” pillar to the other three pillars in its strategy (Remove, Repair, and Reduce) to ensure that “a wide array of diverse perspectives and backgrounds are fully engaged in pursuit of solutions.”
This was my chance to capture the ears of all 400 people in the room. So I went to the mic and asked participants to ponder the same question that I posed to readers of this blog on Day One of the Summit: “What are the long-term implications of the fact that there’s only a single commercial fisherman (me) present among the participants?” The subtext was: If Ocean Visions and the marine carbon dioxide (mCDR) community are committed to achieving “Reach,” then how are they going to really, truly bring communities in—not just as spectators (which is basically the role I was in at the Summit), but as leaders?
Bridging the divide
Fishermen reading this blog can probably relate to the strong sense of cognitive dissonance I experienced during my three days at the the Summit. There was something jarring about being in a hotel with 400 mCDR experts plotting a whole new use for the very same oceans that communities like mine live in, work in, and love—without any of us (except me) there. I’m a big proponent of the principle “nothing about us without us” but I continue to be shocked at how often plans and strategies are crafted without affected people present.
A few concepts from social science and socio-ecological systems came to my mind throughout the week. One is the distinction between “ecosystem people” and “biosphere people.” As conventionally defined, "ecosystem people" rely on resources from their immediate surroundings, while "biosphere people" access resources from a wider area through market. But I think the concept can be extended to how people think: ecosystem people have a relationship with their immediate environment and feel a strong sense of duty to protect that environment from external threats, while biosphere people are focused on planetary environmental goals, such as re-balancing the carbon cycle.
Another relevant concept is the notion of center-periphery dynamics, drawn from studies of imperialism and international development. This notion defines the “center” or “core” as the dominant region, where material and economic resources and power are concentrated. In contrast, the “periphery” includes the less developed, often resource-rich, and dependent regions that are exploited by the core.
I would contend that commercial fishermen are ecosystem people, and that they tend to be located on the periphery of a lot of the environmental decision making that affects them. I would also contend that the vast majority of the mCDR experts at the Ocean Visions Summit are biosphere people, and that their ties to deep-pocketed funders, investors, policy makers, and others who command the respect of those powerful and well-resourced entities place them within the core of center-periphery dynamics—even if many of them are scrappy startups struggling to get a foot in the door as the new kids on the block.
The alignment between ecosystem+periphery and biosphere+core means that all too often, ecosystem people are invisible or unfamiliar to biosphere people. When the two do interface, it’s sometimes in an adversarial context, where the efforts of ecosystem people to protect the places they know and love are interpreted by biosphere people as “opposition” to the urgent goal of saving the planet (through solutions devised by biosphere people), rather than as struggles borne of duty and loyalty to protect the local ecosystems that provide for them.
Although shattering these larger power dynamics and maladapted framings is beyond the scope of what we can ask the mCDR community to do on its own, the mCDR community should at least recognize the influence these dynamics play, and situate their engagement or “Reach” efforts within this understanding. So, too, should commercial fishermen.
Investing in fishermen’s capacity to engage
I’m currently working with Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA) on a project to ensure fishermen have a voice in mCDR. Knowing that RODA and the Fishery Friendly Climate Action Campaign are operating in this space, many earnest and well-meaning mCDR researchers have reached out to ask us for advice on how to best engage the commercial fishing community. But every time I’m on the receiving end of these well-intentioned requests, I feel my shoulders slump as I contemplate the added workload that this engagement would imply for me and my fisherman peers.
One symptom of being on the periphery is a perpetual sense of overwhelm—a feeling of always being a step behind, always out of the loop, with no ability to catch up or to get out ahead of change. In the past decade, fishing communities have been grappling with climate and ecosystem change, drops in fish prices, a pandemic, and offshore wind. Our ability to deal with new things that could impact us (like mCDR) is severely strained.
Most fishermen who represent our industry in spaces like this are volunteers, and we must always balance our ability to attend meetings with the economic imperative of going fishing. Taking a day off work to attend an mCDR engagement meeting not only means a loss of income for the person attending the meeting, but for everyone else on the boat. A fisherman can’t simply take off an hour or two on a fishing day; you either go fishing that day, or you wait until the next fishable day—which could be days away, since our work schedules are dictated by wind and sea conditions. While the fishing industry does have some professionally staffed organizations, the needs our industry is facing today steeply outpace these organizations’ scattered and unevenly resourced abilities to meet them. There’s no room to take on new issues like mCDR without sacrificing focus on other, more pressing issues.
And yet—somewhat to my surprise, given these palpable capacity constraints—in a series of roundtables I’ve been leading with the fishing community this spring, participants have consistently said that it’s never too early for mCDR researchers, developers, and permitting agencies to start bringing fishermen into the conversation.
If fishermen want to engage early and often, but are already overstretched by multiple competing demands, then the question we need to focus on is not only how to engage fishermen in mCDR, but even more importantly: How can we build the fishing community’s capacity to engage in mCDR?
What Ocean Visions can do
If the Ocean Visions network is serious about “Reach,” then their next biennial Summit in 2027 needs to include much more substantive representation by the commercial fishing community than their 2025 Summit did.
This can begin by making the Summit financially accessible to commercial fisherman and their cash-constrained organizations. At the 2025 Summit, the $600 registration fee was discounted for early career professionals ($500) and waived altogether for participants from low-income and lower-middle-income countries and recently terminated federal scientists. But I had to pay full price, which was only possible thanks to the grant-funded project I’m co-leading with RODA. When this grant runs out, who will be at the Summit to represent the fishing community, and how will they afford to be there?
Summit organizers should also make every effort to include fishermen as panelists. I was hoping to get myself into a speaking role this year, but I misinterpreted the proposal submission instructions and wound up missing the window of opportunity. My efforts to beg conference organizers for a spot after the deadline were unfruitful. I want to thank Brad Warren (profiled in my blog from Day Two of the Summit) for giving up some of his speaking time as a panelist to put the mic in my hands and invite me to say a few words about fishing communities. Next time, that kind of platform for commercial fishermen should be guaranteed—even if it’s done through virtual participation by fishermen or the delivery of pre-recorded testimonies.
What funders can do
While I hate to make this post all about money, and while I’m cautious about the corrosive influence that outside funding can sometimes have on fishing community cohesion and trust, it’s hard to see how our capacity constraints could ever be overcome without more funds.
As a case in point, the project that RODA and I are working on is funded by a mix of federal and philanthropic sources coordinated by the National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP), which supplied a total of $24.3 million to 17 mCDR-related projects in 2023. The funding competition we participated in included two tracks: community engagement projects, whose budgets could not exceed $100,000 each, and research projects, which could run into the millions. Ours was the only project funded in the community engagement track, representing 0.4% of total funds awarded. While some of the larger research-based projects included budgets for their own project team members to engage communities, ours was the only one focused on building community capacity to engage.
These statistics speak for themselves about the relative importance that funders and planners place on community engagement and social science compared to technical research and development. I would urge them to rebalance their priorities.
Although U.S. federal funding for science and climate solutions is likely to be scarce for the next several years, philanthropic initiatives like the Ocean Resilience and Climate Alliance (ORCA) have pledged to “provide a surge of more than $300 million dollars in grants over four years to catalyze work across a handful of immediate ocean-climate priorities,” including mCDR. Private funding may feel less transparent or publicly accountable than federal funding, but it may also be more malleable to community input and pressure. One thing we in the fishing community should consider, in coordination with other affected oceanfront communities such as tribes, is to ask funders to pledge a minimum percentage of their total funding towards growing communities’ capacity to engage in ocean climate solutions.
What fishermen can do
Fishermen have an opportunity right now to shape our own community’s engagement in mCDR, by participating in a series of virtual roundtables that I am coordinating this spring. But time is of the essence: these roundtables will only continue for another two weeks (my fishing season is about to start!). Interested fishermen, shoreside fishery participants, and fisheries representatives from Alaska, the West Coast, and the Northeast are encouraged to sign up to participate.
Input gathered through these roundtables will be rolled into a set of draft guidance memos produced by RODA in partnership with staff of several regional ocean and coastal acidification networks (Alaska, California Current, and Northeast). In the fall, if our federal funding holds, we’ll recruit an “mCDR thought leadership forum” populated by fishermen from these three regions to finalize the guidance memos and chart a plan for the fishing industry’s engagement on mCDR issues beyond the life of this grant-funded project. My hope is that this forum can act as a standing committee, shepherding our industry’s engagement on mCDR into the future and becoming a go-to point of contact for anyone in the mCDR research, development, or policy community seeking to involve the fishing industry in co-designing a “fishery sensitive” future for mCDR.
This is just a beginning, but by taking this approach, I hope we can move the fishing community from the periphery to the center of mCDR strategy. Please reach out to me at fisheryfriendlyclimateaction@gmail.com if you’d like to discuss further.
