I The Warning

The latest science on the ocean and polar regions

In 1975, Columbia University professor and oceanographer Wallace Smith Broecker sounded the first alarm about human-induced global warming when US journal Science published Climatic Change: Are we on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?, believed to be the first time the phrase was used in an academic paper.

As we approach the 50th anniversary of Broecker’s seminal article, his prediction that rising carbon dioxide levels in the Earth’s atmosphere would cause significant warming has proved eerily correct.

Last year was the hottest year on record for the world’s ocean – worrying, because warmer ocean temperatures charge evaporation, the trigger behind extreme weather events such as hurricanes and cyclones. According to recent research by the University of Edinburgh/University of Zurich, melting glaciers have caused almost 2cm of sea level rise since the start of the 21st century – a threat for the two billion people who depend on meltwater for food/water supply or hydropower.

Meanwhile, a cavalcade of disturbing stories appears daily on our news feeds: sperm whales stranded in Scotland, coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, polar bears sneaking into Ontario towns for food.

According to climate scientist Johan Rockström, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, it all suggests the Earth is losing its ability to bounce back. As he told the Villars Institute’s Ocean and Poles Roundtable in March, “The world might be seeing the first signs of losing its resilience… Today as [climate scientists] we’re more concerned than ever before.”

The Earth’s ocean and polar regions are on the frontline of the climate crisis, both acting as harbingers of the fate which could happen to the rest of the world. For example, rapidly rising ocean temperatures – which are now increasing at 0.27C per decade, almost four times as much as the 0.06C per decade rate in the 1980s – are another sign the climate crisis is accelerating faster than scientists feared. As Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, professor of marine science at the University of Queensland told the Roundtable, these warmer-than-average waters are bleaching much of the world’s coral. And given that corals provide a home to 25% of all marine species, these ecosystems are among the most vulnerable to collapse—and with increasing heat stress, simple restoration won’t suffice. We must pivot toward regeneration, cultivating adaptive, resilient reefs that can thrive in a changing ocean.

The poles and ocean also help regulate the Earth’s climate. As the United Nations reminded us in 2022, the ocean is “the world’s greatest ally against climate change”: it soaks up a quarter of all carbon dioxide emissions, capturing 90% of the excess heat produced by these emissions.

We also depend on the ocean for half the oxygen we breathe. However, as Rockström highlighted, dissolved oxygen concentrations have declined by 2% in the ocean since 1960. At the same time, anoxic dead zones – areas starved of oxygen in the open ocean – have soared; the Baltic Sea has a dead zone larger than 1.5 times the size of Denmark.

It could have disastrous consequences for the marine life which has ruled these waters for hundreds of millions of years: Callum Roberts, professor of marine conservation at the University of Exeter told the Roundtable that this deoxygenation is likely to see fish grow in progressively smaller body sizes, limiting procreation, as they will produce fewer eggs.

Although the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere is good, it also creates ocean acidification which can leave fish struggling to breathe, and crustaceans unable to form their shells.

At the Ocean and Poles Roundtable, Rockström delivered more sobering news. Until last year, sea levels were rising at a steady 4mm a year. But in 2024, sea levels unexpectedly shot up by 5.9mm.

With nine of the Earth’s 16 tipping points — which occur when global temperature reaches a critical threshold, triggering irreversible changes — located in the polar regions, Rockström warned that five of these flashpoints are likely to be ‘tipped’ into a state of unstoppable decline. These include the Greenland ice sheet, whose complete melt would drive dangerous sea-level rise, and the Arctic permafrost, which locks away more than 1.4 billion metric tons of carbon; if this ‘timebomb’ thaws, that carbon could be released as methane, accelerating breakdown. Professor Johan Rockström further emphasised that 1.5 °C is itself a hard boundary — one the world will likely breach very soon — but he stressed it’s not too late to pull temperatures back down if we rapidly phase out fossil fuels and shore up the resilience of natural systems.

The melting of Arctic sea ice doesn’t just threaten to weaken the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), aka “the engine”, the vital system driving heat between the northern and southern hemispheres. It could also trigger the albedo effect, whereby shrinking ice leaves darker ocean exposed, absorbing rather than reflecting the sun’s heat, accelerating global warming. At current rates, this decline is so rapid that Arctic sea ice could vanish entirely by 2050.

“For more than 150 years, we’ve been abusing the planet, but it’s been protecting us,” said Rockström. “[It’s a reminder] more than ever, we need to stay within planetary boundaries.”

II Testimonies

Dispatches from the frontline of the climate crisis

In summer 2024, Villars Institute board member Keith Tuffley was on an expedition yacht navigating the treacherous Northwest Passage, the Canadian archipelago where hundreds of people, trying to find a route between the Atlantic and Pacific (including Sir John Franklin and his doomed 1845 expedition) met an icy grave in the 19th century.

Tuffley’s voyage was more straightforward. The four-month, 15 000 km voyage would take him and a team of young scientists through many of the Arctic tipping points, conducting research and collecting eDNA samples.

Along the way, Tuffley and his crew encountered disturbing reminders of the havoc climate change is causing, whether it was melting Arctic ice or when crew member Kester Haynes was flying his paramotor and smelled smoke, most probably from wildfires on mainland Canada, many miles away. Later, a scientific report from the expedition revealed microplastics strewn all the way across the Northwest Passage – worryingly, one of the most sparsely-populated areas on Earth.

Explorers can often act as early warning signs about the devastation humanity has wreaked. In 1985, British explorer Robert Swan was on an expedition in Antarctica (he later became the first person to walk to both poles) when something unusual happened to him and his team: the skin on their faces started blistering, peeling off as they trudged through the ice. It wasn’t until they arrived home that they realised they’d been walking underneath a hole in the ozone layer. The prolonged UV exposure caused irrevocable damage: Swan’s eyes permanently changed color from blue to gray.

Stories about the climate’s impact on the ocean and polar regions needn’t be apocalyptic; they can inspire too. In summer 2024, Dr Kat Bruce, founder of nature intelligence tech firm NatureMetrics, joined five other women to circumnavigate the UK coastline as part of the Sea Change Row voyage. During the voyage, they found uplifting examples of sea rewilding and conservation, whether it was in Lyme Bay, Dorset (where a marine-protected area has become a role model for sustainable fisheries) or Ullapool, Scotland, where edible-sized cod and haddock has returned for the first time in 30 years.

III Turning science into action

What’s needed for a thriving blue economy

The mood at Villars Institute’s Ocean and Poles Roundtable wasn’t defeatist; promising solutions were identified, and most experts highlighted that the finance and technology needed to combat the climate crisis already exist—it just needs to be rolled out at a faster speed. The rise of climate denialism and rollback of pollution protections among some leaders is an impediment that can be overcome too: Rockström referenced recent opinion polls which found 60-70% of people are concerned about human-caused climate change. Citing sociologist Everett Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory, this weight of public opinion might quash inertia and resistance surrounding the climate emergency.

Perhaps the most compelling example of a mindset shift on environmental issues came from legendary oceanographer Sylvia Earle. She pointed out that until the global moratorium on commercial whaling in the mid-1980s, “Whales were commodities, which we hunted for oil, meat or money… Now we see them as carbon capture units [the leviathans store huge amounts of carbon in their bodies, releasing nutrients as they breathe, which encourages the production of phytoplankton, which much of the marine ecosystem depends upon].”

While the landmark Cop15 “30x30” target to protect 30% of the planet’s land and water by 2030 could help thwart biodiversity loss, it’s clear businesses in the private sector are needed to make it a reality too. At present, the so-called “blue economy” (which could spawn new, profitable industries such as marine renewable energy, sustainable fisheries, aquafarming and tourism) is considered a peripheral interest by many asset managers and institutional investors, who typically expect more secure, quicker returns on their investments.

Although there’s an estimated 164 impact investment funds targeting the blue economy (up from 26 a decade ago), many are venture capital funds, offering less flexibility for startups who need time to build their businesses or assets such as processing facilities. Experts at the Ocean and Poles Roundtable suggested these startups need patient capital, de-risking fees and revenue-based financing to help them scale.

The Roundtable also identified several promising tech innovations which could propel the blue economy. These include Saildrones which offer advanced deep-sea mapping and collect important data on weather patterns, or UK-based Arc Marine’s signature ‘reef cube’ which helps replenish reefs by generating more biodiversity when attached to moorings and breakwaters.

One of the most revolutionary developments for monitoring and studying biodiversity is environmental DNA (eDNA) technology, which can turn samples of sea water (or soil or air) into a library of genetic data about marine species (down to the smallest invertebrate) by analysing the minute traces of DNA that they shed.

IV The Need for Storytelling

When truth is stranger than fiction, why aren’t people listening?

For many years, doomsday narratives have dominated popular discourse on the climate emergency. The failure to paint a picture of a liveable future can leave people sinking into the claustrophobia of climate anxiety, as if the only recourse is indifference or despair. This is particularly true of younger generations: one 2021 Lancet Planetary Health international study of 16-25-year-olds found 56% of those surveyed felt humanity was doomed. To help galvanise these demographics, Jade Hameister – who at 16, became the youngest person to ski to both north and south poles, plus the Greenland ice sheet – spoke to the Roundtable about the need to shift climate stories from fear/pessimism to messages of positivity instead.

Meanwhile, because much of the language used by scientists errs towards the scrupulous, it lacks the robust phraseology needed to communicate the urgency of the crisis. As Rockström mentioned in his closing remarks, science, storytelling, and creativity are inextricably linked. Using data alone won’t spur people into action; the millennia-old magic of storytelling might.

The work of France’s Tara Ocean Foundation is one example. Since 2003, its scientific studies into plankton or ocean pollution have captured public imagination via acclaimed educational programs or having artists on board their expedition schooners.

We may also need to reframe the way we think about some species. Take sharks. Conservation scientist Arzucan Askin told the Roundtable, these majestic creatures are oft-depicted as fearsome predators: Jaws, the scourge of surfers, a synonym for words such as “swindler” and “criminal”. As Askin pointed out, such demonisation could be driving them to extinction: almost 100 million sharks are killed each year.

What isn’t told is that sharks rarely threaten humans; in fact, in some parts of the world, such as the Maldives, swimming with nurse sharks is a family activity. Sharks also intersect with our daily lives in surprising ways: DNA tests have shown UK fish and chip shops and pet food manufacturers often end up selling endangered sharks as ‘fish.’

The most evocative stories are told by or about those communities most exposed to the climate crisis. As the media landscape evolves from a centrifugal model (think state broadcasters or national newspapers) to one where anybody can create – then share – videos, blogs and podcasts, UK wildlife filmmakers Silverback has launched open-source library Open Planet, giving people (particularly younger generations) free access to high-quality climate/nature footage to provide their own personal accounts of the biggest story of our times.

Science maps out the challenges and innovation delivers the solutions—but it’s storytelling that completes the picture. At the Villars Summit, nearly every session underscored how powerful narratives can transform data and breakthroughs into collective action, bridge divides, and drive the climate response forward.

V The new rules of engagement

The climate conundrum won’t be cracked without collaboration

One of the aims of Villars Institute’s Ocean and Poles Roundtable was to build a mini-community of ocean and polar experts. Whether it’s the albedo effect or melting sea ice, the worlds of oceanography and cryosphere studies regularly overlap, but these specialists rarely get the opportunity to share knowledge, remaining relatively siloed in their respective fields.

Such collaborations will be critical in the years ahead if we’re going to protect our ocean and polar regions, whether it’s winning over the hearts and minds of people who think differently or changing climate apathy into action.

Determining the fate of the “high seas” (the two-thirds of the world’s ocean which lies outside national boundaries) is one area where cooperation is desperately needed. In 2023 the UN agreed on a treaty to protect the high seas – seen as critical for reaching the 30x30 targets, as it would establish marine-protected areas (MPAs) beyond national jurisdiction. The success of this treaty depends on politicians, scientists, corporations, NGOs, coastal communities and environmental groups all coming together to share knowledge and skillsets.

As the planet navigates its way through climate chaos, engaging local communities who have lived alongside nature for centuries (and are its biggest champions), and implicitly understanding the hardships of the ocean and polar regions will also be crucial. As Dr Bruce discovered on her voyage around the UK, “Empowering our coastal communities is the key for turning things around for the world’s ocean.”

Finally, none of this will be achieved without intergenerational collaboration: working closely with young people who didn’t cause the climate crisis… but will inevitably be dealing with its fallout. One example is Swan’s ‘2041 Expeditions’ which have taken 4,100 people from 87 nations to Antarctica, helping younger people from China (the world’s largest CO₂ emitter) or the US (which is set to exit the Paris agreement) become passionate about saving the planet.

This year might mark the 50th anniversary of Broecker’s term “global warming” but as remarked by Keith Tuffley, “focusing on the ocean and polar regions in 2025 also marks an unparalleled opportunity: for humanity to demonstrate it can stand together, rather than being poles apart.”

The Villars Institute remains committed to the ocean and polar regions as a central focus of our work. By convening experts, communities, and changemakers through initiatives like the Ocean and Poles Roundtable, we proudly continue providing a platform for collaboration to sustain momentum and advance the agenda. With the UN Ocean Conference 2025 on the horizon—where the global community will reset priorities for marine protection—and the Ocean and Poles Roundtable returning at the Villars Institute Summit 2026, we invite you to join us in driving bold, science-led solutions and compelling storytelling to safeguard our shared blue and white frontiers.