Progress report for
Facilitating global coordination and collaboration on ocean acidification
Achievement at a glance
Since 2012 the IAEA OA-ICC has created over 850 capacity building opportunities for more than 700 scientists from 100 countries. In our role as coordinator and facilitator we have organized dozens of cooperation and technical meetings, including most recently a combined virtual and in-person event in Monrovia, Liberia on January 8th 2021, planned in partnership with the OA Africa Network. Our OA bibliography currently totals over 8000 OA-related publications, more than 1,100 of which are available on our separate online biological data portal created in collaboration with Xiamen University in China and hosted on PANGEA. The bibliographic databases are complimented by the OA-ICC newsstream, sharing the latest publications and news on OA science, which reaches hundreds of daily readers and has more than 400,000 views to date. Our mission is aligned with the goals and objectives of the Ocean Decade and is focused on SDG 14.3 which addresses ocean acidification.We remain committed to assisting our friends, partners, and colleagues in the community, and are redoubling our efforts to support the advancement of OA science, facilitating greater collaboration in the community and providing opportunities to scientists from IAEA Member States and beyond, especially those who are early-career and underrepresented. Our ambitions include training hundreds of more scientists in the years to come, supporting the development of secondary reference materials in other countries, participating in many more conferences, and developing more online resources available to the scientific community.
Challenges faced in implementation
The Global COVID-19 Pandemic caused the postponement of events and other challenges that prevented us from attaining some of our deliverables in 2020, since trainings could not be held and conferences like the 5th Annual Symposium on Oceans in a High CO2 World were postponed. Many coordination meetings such as our technical advisory committee were planned around this event and had to be postponed indefinitely. COVID-related restrictions also meant the disruption of our office workflow and personnel, and difficulties working with our partners.However, we did all that was possible to complete those deliverables and remain committed to supporting the postponed conferences and trainings. During the pandemic the OA-ICC has adapted, organizing, and participating in many online events, and planning virtual trainings to take place in 2021. We were able to attract generous financial support from the governments of the United States and Sweden and created 10 home-based assignments for ocean acidification scientists to develop research papers and evaluate past training efforts. The OA-ICC also continues as an integral member of the Global Ocean Acidification Observation Network (GOA-ON) and is closely allied with the many regional GOA-ON Hubs.
We continued to meet regularly with our partners and received generous contributions from the United States and Sweden to continue our mission. This has allowed us to target regions with low OA capacity such as in India and West Africa, and to evaluate our past programs to offer better support and services in the coming decade.
Beneficiaries
Scientists studying ocean acidification in developing IAEA Member States and beyond\r\n Students, policy makers, and administrators seeking to address issues related to ocean acidification