For a long time, the ocean was absent from my reading. Not because it was never mentioned, but because it always sat at the margins. I read about the economic impacts of climate change, integrated assessment models, projected future damages. Agriculture, health, infrastructure, productivity. The ocean entered late—or not at all. And that absence began to weigh on me.
I knew—like anyone who has ever looked at a globe—that something did not add up. The system that regulates the planet’s climate, that feeds millions of people, that connects continents and cultures, barely appeared in the calculations we use to make climate policy decisions. That was where the unease began. I did not yet have a clear answer, but I did have one certainty: if I wanted to understand that gap, I needed to move closer.
That is why I moved to San Diego, to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in 2022.
I arrived carrying a question and many doubts about what an answer might look like. During my first week, I spoke with Scripps’ then-director. I told her—carried by the excitement of having just arrived—that it felt wonderful to work every day facing the sea. She smiled and offered a gentle but firm warning: don’t let it become wallpaper. It happens to many people, she said. The ocean is always there—until you stop seeing it.
In time, I understood what she meant. The ocean began to accompany my days. Sometimes wrapped in fog, sometimes under an open sky, and on a few occasions marked by the distant exhalation of a passing whale. I moved from seminar to seminar, from conversation to conversation, and it remained there. Present. Constant. It did not speak, but it did not leave.
That was when it became a neighbor.
My colleagues studied bleaching reefs, mangroves losing their protective capacity, fish changing course in search of cooler waters. The ocean was moving. Changing. Responding. And yet, when I returned to the economic models that inform climate decisions, the sea remained a blurred background. The circle closed. This was not just an academic intuition—it was a structural omission.
The study we later published in Nature Climate Change emerged from that tension. We attempted something seemingly simple: to include ocean impacts in the calculation of the social cost of carbon, the figure that estimates the total damage caused by emitting an additional ton of carbon dioxide. When we did—adding losses in fisheries, coastal infrastructure, nutrition, recreation, and cultural values—the number nearly doubled.
Not because it had been “wrong” before, but because it had been incomplete.
The ocean is warming, acidifying, and losing oxygen. That translates into reefs that no longer sustain tourism and fisheries; mangroves that no longer buffer storms; fish stocks shifting toward higher latitudes, leaving communities without livelihoods. It translates into more vulnerable ports, more frequently flooded coastal cities, and poorer diets in regions where the sea is the primary source of protein. But the point is not just the number. It is what that number allows us to decide.
The social cost of carbon is used to evaluate public policy, investments, and regulations. If the ocean is not there, it is left out of the conversation. And what is left out is often the first to be sacrificed.
I no longer live in front of the Pacific. I returned to Mexico, to a city surrounded by mountains, far from the horizon line where the sea insists. But the ocean did not stay behind. It appears in the Gulf, in the Caribbean, in the Mexican Pacific; in communities that depend on it to eat, to work, to exist—and in the public decisions we continue to make as if it could wait. My neighbor, the ocean, never stopped paying the bill. We are only beginning to look at it.
Photo credit: Octavio Aburto