Biological oceanographer breaks down the linkages between human impacts on the ocean and their effects on human systems
Look out at the ocean, a symbol of constant endurance and abundance. It’s tempting to think that in the face of a rapidly changing climate and all the impacts it brings — disaster, food insecurity, habitat and biodiversity loss to name a few — the ocean will always be there.
But under the ocean’s seemingly unchanging surface, a host of shifts are occurring — some we can predict, many we cannot. And those impacts are bound to have effects that reach into our human systems as well.
With a career spent examining the mechanisms controlling diversity and function in marine life, UC Santa Barbara biological oceanographer Debora Iglesias-Rodriguez has the perfect vantage point from which to witness these human-generated changes and anticipate the effects to come. Her new book, “The Future of Marine Life in a Changing Ocean: The Fate of Marine Organisms and Processes under Climate Change and other Types of Human Perturbation” (World Scientific, 2019), is the synthesis of decades of work in this area. It connects the dots from marine processes altered by human activity back to the subsequent effects on human systems due to a changing ocean.
Continue reading at University of California Santa Barbara
Image via University of California Santa Barbara
