Prime Minister Carney of Canada recently accepted the European Commission's invitation to co-chair OceanEye, a new initiative to make Europe — with Canada at its side — a world leader in ocean observation as the United States retreats from the field. At Davos, he urged middle powers to step forward where hegemons step back.
At the same time, his government is quietly decimating the very science that this commitment depends on. We applaud the Prime Minister's counsel that middle powers must act where great powers withdraw. But co-chairing an international observation initiative while cutting your own observation programs is not leadership. It is virtue signaling.
Canada has a rare opening to claim genuine environmental sovereignty — to own the data, the science and the foresight on which our coasts, fisheries and climate preparedness depend. We should seize it before the instruments go quiet and the ocean, once again, takes us by surprise.
The Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) is cutting roughly $100-million to research on ocean science, species at risk and marine conservation. Cuts to programs the government recently pledged to strengthen. We know from colleagues inside the department what this means on the water.
The Atlantic Zone Monitoring Program — created decades ago in response to the collapse of the Northern Cod fishery, so that Canada would not be blind to changing ocean conditions — has been significantly reduced. And Canada has withdrawn its support for OSNAP, the international program measuring the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, at the very moment American funding for AMOC appears to be stalled.
We are not speculating about what these cuts mean. As Canadian scientists, working internationally, we are watching the instruments go dark.
One of us led DFO’s ocean monitoring effort in Newfoundland and Labrador and developed public climate indices linking environmental changes to fluctuation in fisheries and ecosystems. The other has spent decades helping design and build the global ocean observing system. We are not speculating about what these cuts mean. As Canadian scientists, working internationally, we are watching the instruments go dark.
The timing could hardly be worse. A "super" El Niño, fueled by climate change, is developing in the Pacific — an anomaly the size of North America with the demonstrated power to disrupt global weather, agriculture and fisheries for years. In the Atlantic, scientists are increasingly alarmed that climate change is weakening the AMOC, the vast conveyor of ocean currents that regulates the Earth's climate.
A significant slowdown of the AMOC — or worse, a collapse — would bring global governance challenges, especially for countries around the North Atlantic, with rising seas on North America's east coast, frigid European winters, fiercer hurricanes and upended rainfall patterns.
We do not know when the AMOC will falter, or by how much. Perhaps next year; perhaps decades from now. That uncertainty is precisely the point. The only way to see a collapse coming — the only early-warning system that exists — is through sustained measurements of the ocean itself.
We monitor the atmosphere moderately well. We monitor the ocean poorly and are choosing to further reduce that effort. Some scientists have argued that the world's long-running ocean time series should carry World Heritage status, because leaving their continuation "to the vagaries of fate or government funding cycles is illogical and irresponsible." We are currently proving their point.
For decades, the international community could afford complacency because the United States carried the load, funding more than two-thirds of key global ocean observing programs. That era is over.
Our dependence on a single country has been exposed for what it always was: a structural fragility in the world's ability to track the climate system.
The Trump administration has begun dismantling American ocean monitoring — slashing, then only partially restoring, the Ocean Observatories Initiative, and threatening the National Science Foundation support for key AMOC initiatives such as OSNAP. Our dependence on a single country has been exposed for what it always was: a structural fragility in the world's ability to track the climate system.
OceanEye is meant to fill this void, and Canada — with the longest coastline on Earth, three oceans at its door, and a deep bench of ocean science expertise — is a natural partner to help fill it. Canada was once a significant contributor to global ocean observation. The knowledge and capacity remain. We are missing true commitment and support.
So here is what stepping forward would look like. Restore Canada's commitment to OSNAP and the AMOC observing effort in the subpolar North Atlantic — our ocean backyard, and the region in which the collapse would strike first. Reverse the reductions to the Atlantic Zone Monitoring Program rather than hollowing out a system built from the hard lessons of the cod collapse.
Let's attach real, sustained funding to Canada's OceanEye co-chairmanship, so that our leadership includes more ships, sensors and scientists and expanded ocean science and monitoring not just communiqués. The pledging event for Ocean Eye and GOOS, to be held in September at the United Nations in New York, would be a great opportunity to announce such a commitment.