THE SOCIOECONOMIC IMPACTS OF OCEAN ACIDIFICATION

participantAs humans' atmospheric emissions of carbon dioxide enter the upper ocean, seawater pH and carbonate ion concentration are decreasing in ways that appear to harm some marine creatures that form hard shells or skeletons. This so-called ocean acidification (OA) impacts individual creatures in a range of ways, such as decreasing or delaying calcification, altering photosynthesis, and decreasing reproduction, yet the consequences of OA on populations of these organisms are not well understood yet. This casts a great deal of uncertainty on how human communities may feel the effects of OA, but we hypothesize that humans may experience changes in valuable marine ecosystem services provided by calcifying organisms such as nutrition, support for tourism, or coastal protection. We investigate some of the potential impacts of OA on human communities via commercial fishing revenues, nutrition, and export values, and we find that the negative effects of OA will vary regionally, depending on ecosystem resilience and on human dependence on ecosystem services provided by calcifiers and their predators. We also explore the capacity of human communities to adapt to changing ecosystem services in relation to nations' gross domestic product, governance, and other factors relative to the timing of significant changes in ocean chemistry