The Biological Influence on Future Ocean Storage of Carbon (BIO-Carbon) NERC Strategic Programme addresses key and pressing questions on how marine life helps the ocean store huge amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) that would otherwise be in the atmosphere.

Emerging evidence indicates that climate models are not fully accounting for the impact of marine organisms. This undermines carbon policies, such as national net zero targets.

BIO-Carbon is carefully designed to produce new understanding of biological processes. It will provide robust predictions of future ocean carbon storage in a changing climate.

The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) is sponsored by UN organisations and coordinates climate research internationally.

This programme will address two of the three priorities identified by WCRP:

  • what biological and abiological processes drive and control ocean carbon storage?
  • can and will climate-carbon feedbacks amplify climate changes over the 21st century?

BIO-Carbon has three interlinked programme challenges, which will address different aspects of biological influence:

  1. How does marine life affect the potential for seawater to absorb CO2, and how will this change?
  2. How will the rate at which marine life converts dissolved CO2 into organic carbon change?
  3. How will climate change-induced shifts in respiration by the marine ecosystem affect the future ocean storage of carbon?

Website https://bio-carbon.ac.uk

PI/Champion: Dr Adrian Martin, National Oceanography Centre
Email: adrian.martin at noc.ac.uk

Dates
–
Funding

NERC – Strategic Research

Aim

The intended outcomes of BIO-Carbon are to:

  • enhance our understanding of key biological processes that affect how carbon storage by the global ocean will change in the future
  • significantly improve global ocean carbon budget projections, to better inform policy development and decision making in support of net zero ambitions
  • provide new parameterisations of key processes and emergent constraints on global model behaviour for use in simulations feeding into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) seventh assessment report
  • implement new parameterisations and constraints in a suite of global models in order to provide a robust assessment to 2100 of the biologically associated changes in global ocean carbon storage, and their sensitivity to key processes identified by this programme. This assessment should be suitable for inclusion in IPCC’s seventh assessment report
  • provide a significant UK contribution to the UN Ocean Decade outcome for ‘a predicted ocean’ by improving our ability to model oceanic responses under anthropogenic influence
  • address two priorities of the WCRP’s grand challenge on carbon feedbacks in the climate system.