Ocean connections: An introduction to rising risks from a warming, changing ocean

This report explores the hazards and risks associated with ocean warming worldwide. This report explores:

• the definition of ocean risk and its relationship to hazards and vulnerability, and acts to bring together the language the insurance industry uses for risk, with the understanding that the science and conservation community have of the scale, nature and intensity of ocean change;
• five examples of how ocean warming has an impact on our way of life and, as a result, why we believe that ocean warming should be considered as a key risk by international bodies such as the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change;
• how, even though ocean warming may be a single phenomenon, it is already being felt across a surprisingly wide spread of social, environmental and economic settings, and why this matters; and
• why far more immediate action is now needed with far greater ambition if society is to ‘get ahead of the curve’ of the consequences from ocean warming and other ocean changes in the coming years, due to long lag times between cause and effect