The value of transdisciplinary and collaborative ocean research
Wehrmann, Dorothea / Jacqueline Götze / Michał Łuszczuk / Katarzyna Radzik-Maruszak / Arne Riedel
The Current Column (2021)
German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE), The Current Column of 17 June 2021
The theme of this year’s World Ocean Day emphasises the role of oceans for life and livelihoods on Earth. Ocean acidification, loss of sea ice, and retreating glaciers are prominent examples for the profound anthropogenic changes affecting the world’s most sensitive ecosystems. However, too little attention is paid to their relevance for the world’s population. Calls for individual action often go unheard. Governmental regulations such as the ban on throwaway plastics are only mini-steps for changing the prevailing resource-intense behaviour. For managing the world’s oceans more sustainably, one of the purposes of the World Oceans Day and the related campaigns is “to mobilize and unite the world’s population”. To achieve this goal, researchers, who ideally inform policy making, need to make causalities and responsibilities more explicit to impede shirking by governments. The effects of the changing oceans, however, differ among localities. It is crucial for research to translate and earmark the relevance of findings also for societies and individuals living afar and to those for whom these changes often seem too abstract and distant.
Why, for example, should someone in Germany care about houses collapsing into the Arctic Ocean? The simple answer: Because coastal erosion is a global phenomenon that also affects Germany. It is more visible in the Arctic already because the Arctic is warming at least twice as fast as other regions; the groundbreaking judgement by Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court reconfirmed Germany’s responsibility to limit CO2 emissions and made considering future generations a legal requirement. To understand how coastal erosion is affecting the life and livelihoods of coastal communities and beyond at present, it is important to understand coastal erosion as a systemic problem. In the past, coastal erosion in the Arctic has been studied in a siloed way. Still, most research on the changing oceans is conducted in the field of natural sciences and from quite narrow perspectives. While sustainable development and climate change are encouraging more social sciences research, in both fields mostly researchers from afar conduct research on these regions, their ecosystems and peoples. To generate and translate comprehensive findings, to avoid silo-approaches and to identify opportunities for collaborative actions, researchers should commit to more transdisciplinary research, specifically with coastal communities, including indigenous rights holders.
