Climate & Sustainability
Faculty, fellows among global leaders at 2025 United Nations Ocean Conference
University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Center for Coastal Climate Resilience represented at recent international climate meetings
From June 9 to 13, some of the world’s top leaders in marine science and protection convened in Nice, France, for the third United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC). University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Center for Coastal Climate Resilience (CCCR) had strong representation at the conference and the opening Blue Economy Finance Forum (BEFF) in Monaco, with several fellows and faculty attending to share highlights from their research and engage in global dialogues about climate adaptation, mitigation, and the future of our coasts.
Across the five-day event, more than 15,000 attendees from governments, UN agencies, NGOs, the private sector, and other stakeholders came together with the shared goal of advancing ocean conservancy and supporting sustainable marine use. Building on previous summits in New York in 2017 and Lisbon in 2022, the conference concluded with a call to action to increase marine protection, reduce pollution, better regulate the high seas, and tap into financing for vulnerable coastal and island nations.
CCCR Director Mike Beck said he came away with two key perspectives from the conference and forum: “First, funding for adaptation is finally starting to flow from public and private investment funds,” he said. “Second, the U.S. government was missed, but not that much. The U.S. absence is deeply impacting many nations, but many other leaders are rising to the challenge and forging ahead in new and innovative ways and leaving the U.S. behind.”
From Santa Cruz to Nice
CCCR held a number of non-traditional panel events on critical topics including climate risk, insurance innovation, and the resilience benefits of habitat—partnering on sessions with organizations such as AXA, Liverpool FC, ORRAA, Tara Ocean Foundation, and Plymouth Marine Lab.
UC Santa Cruz Earth and planetary sciences professor Adina Paytan, supported by CCCR, served on a panel of experts discussing the benefits and challenges of marine carbon dioxide removal (CDR). According to Paytan, beyond decarbonizing the economy, it is necessary to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere to reach net zero by 2050 and limit climate change negative impacts to humans and ecosystems, and marine CDR technologies have a huge potential.
“While CDR is necessary, we must have frameworks established for permitting and environmental-impact assessment, as well as for monitoring reporting and verification and financing regulations before any CDR is applied at scale,” said Paytan. “We have only one ocean, and we should ensure it is healthy for generations to come. In the meantime, we can focus on nature-based solutions which can remove CO₂ from the atmosphere until the technologies are developed.”
The CCCR team, hosted by the International Coral Reef Initiative (ICRI), showcased recent visualization projects from the Resolve Lab, including an immersive demo of climate risk and reef and mangrove projects in the Caribbean.
“We brought visualization and science communication tools, including an interactive website that will soon be publicly launched,” said Rae Taylor-Burns, a postdoctoral fellow in ocean sciences supported by CCCR. “We also showcased visualizations that were created with game engine technology that can visualize potential flooding impacts of storms with and without habitat, showing how the flooding might be worse if habitat was lost.”
One personal highlight for Beck was linking football, coral reefs and climate change at the Reds for Blue event, which was hosted by the Liverpool Football Club as part of its bigger climate and sustainability efforts. “I shared the story of sea level rise and reef loss eroding away the largest flat piece of coastal land on Petit Martinique,” Beck explained, “which was the critical spot for small-scale fishery boat building during the day, and football practice after hours.”
UC Santa Cruz and CCCR are now preparing for November’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Brazil.