OCEAN CONSERVATION AND CLIMATE ACTION.

• Author: Johnson, Ayana Elizabeth

Journal of International Affairs (JIA): You are the founder of the Urban Ocean Lab. Can you tell us what the organization does and why its work is important?

Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (AEJ): I grew up in New York but I left to go to college and stayed away for 18 years. After all this time studying marine biology and working in ocean conservation, it wasn't until I came home that I really started to think about New York as a coastal city and about the importance of urban ocean conservation. I realized that there wasn't nearly enough work happening in that space, especially on the policy side of things. A third of Americans live in coastal cities. Ocean conservation is not a coastal elite thing; literally a third of the people in our country are at risk if we don't think through what the future of coastal cities could look like. We're really not ready for sea level rise, or storms, or heat, or massive changes in coastal ecosystems.

The Urban Ocean Lab is going to be a hub of thought leadership for the future of coastal cities. How can we design the future for coastal cities? How can we create a legislative framework that would enable us to protect our cities in a changing climate? It's a policy think tank that's grounded in design, which makes it different from other think tanks. It's also unique in that it is focused on the urban-ocean interface.

JIA: You are a trained scientist, and yet you have spent much of your career agitating for climate action. What do you feel is the role of scientists in the climate action movement?

AEJ: It depends on what kind of scientist you are and what skills you have. When I was in graduate school, science communication started to become the new expectation, and I actually don't agree with that. If you're a great scientist and you just want to publish great science, that's a wonderful contribution. If you are a great communicator and you are interested in talking more deeply about the implications of your work, that's great. Every scientist has their own comfort zone.

I don't want to put more weight on scientists because doing the research is often a full-time job. Especially because of the way academia is structured right now, scientists get no credit for all of the work that they do to communicate their science. With the race for tenure, those sorts of activities can actually count against you. We need to fix academia if we want scientists to be more engaged in discussions around the implications of their work because right now there's a huge disincentive to do that. Ultimately though, I hope that more organizations will be consuming the scientific literature and making sure it's applied.

JIA: What do...