US federal cuts threaten international ocean science and diplomacy

Recent disruptions in US federal science are severely affecting multiple science and environment agencies, and universities. These developments are undermining the ocean science and multilateral cooperation that are essential for marine conservation, sustainable resource management and climate resilience globally. Budget cuts, programme terminations and restrictions on key research areas (including climate change and decarbonization) are eroding scientific capacity and compromising the integrity of international assessments, negotiations and monitoring systems. We urge delegates to the third United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC¹), 9–13 June 2025, to recognize that these critical risks require responses that move beyond symbolic commitments and focus on institutional resilience, redundancy and strategic rebalancing.

In early 2025, the White House proposed cutting the Earth science budget of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) by over $3.5 billion, including major reductions to Earth-observing satellite missions. These cuts occur just as data from NASA and other institutions confirm record-breaking ocean temperatures in 2023–2024 (ref. ²), along with unexpectedly high rates of sea level rise³. NASA missions are central to monitoring and understanding Earth’s energy imbalance, cloud dynamics, aerosols and the global carbon cycle — key elements for understanding ocean change and informing early warning systems for ecological impacts and natural disasters. Discontinuing these observations will break long-term data continuity, weaken our capacity to monitor ocean health, hinder climate attribution studies, lead to the loss of ocean’s benefits to people, and undermine the scientific basis for both domestic and international policies.