UCSB Study - "Huge Parts Of The Ocean Will No Longer Be Recognizable" As Human Impacts Rise 2-3X By 2050

By 2050, the combined impacts of climate change and human activity on the ocean could be two to three times greater than they are today. Without urgent efforts to reduce these threats, a new study from the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis—an independent research affiliate of the University of California, Santa Barbara—warns those forces could completely transform, or even wipe out, entire seascapes.

“Huge parts of the ocean will no longer be recognizable,” said Ben Halpern, lead author of the study and the research center’s director. “There are areas that will effectively just collapse and cease to be functioning as natural systems.” For more than 20 years, Halpern, a marine ecologist, has been charting the ways humans are reshaping coastlines and oceans. In 2008, he produced one of the first global maps to pinpoint where marine ecosystems were under the most stress at the time. Since then, he said, he has emphasized the need to look ahead and project how global warming, along with other human-driven pressures, like industrial fishing, shipping, land-based agriculture and coastal development, are likely to intensify and converge.

“Telling us how things are now is super important, but anticipating what they might be like in the future is a really powerful—and potentially more powerful—tool for informing management and conservation,” Halpern said. His latest study does just this, providing a sweeping global forecast of which regions and marine habitats are most likely to be affected by mounting threats caused by humans.

To do this, Halpern and his team collated multiple data sets from a suite of models that predict future climate change, the movement of fish stocks and fisheries demands, as well as those that show how human populations are shifting around the world. By layering these data sets on top of one another, one of the study’s co-authors and analysts, Melanie Frazier, said they were able to identify areas most at-risk.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/26092025/human-ocean-impacts-research/