Bernie Bastien-Olvera

That’s how we officially kick off the semester in my research lab—with ambitious goals, beautiful human beings and delicious tamales!

Check out our new lab page here:
climaysociedad.atmosfera.unam.mx/hub-ecosiste...

Termination shock could make the cost of climate damage even higher Solar geoengineering could halve the economic cost of climate change, but stopping it would cause temperatures to rebound sharply, leading to greater damage than unabated global warming

New paper with Francisco Estrada!

This is a paper on termination shock risk and the governance challenge of deploying solar geoengineering when international coordination is so hard to achieve.

Paper: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

New Scientist: www.newscientist.com/article/2513...

Accounting for ocean impacts nearly doubles the social cost of carbon - Nature Climate Change Oceans provide essential ecosystem services to human society, yet the climate impacts on blue capital have long been ignored. Incorporating the latest works on ocean science and economics, researchers...

Climate change has an impact on the oceans, which in turn affects humanity, including our economy. In this recent paper, we quantify these impacts www.nature.com/articles/s41..., led by @bbastien.bsky.social with @francescogranella.bsky.social @maxtav.bsky.social
within @sparccle.bsky.social project

My Neighbor, the Ocean

🔍 Behind the Paper: 'My Neighbor, the Ocean.' 🌊 The system that regulates the planet’s climate barely appeared in climate policy calculations. Not because it had been “wrong” before, but because it had been incomplete.🔗 Read more here: bit.ly/49NXSo4. @bbastien.bsky.social #ClimateChange

Accounting for ocean impacts nearly doubles the social cost of carbon - Nature Climate Change Oceans provide essential ecosystem services to human society, yet the climate impacts on blue capital have long been ignored. Incorporating the latest works on ocean science and economics, researchers...

The social cost of carbon (SCC), a crucial indicator for #climatechange policy, has largely overlooked the significant economic and societal benefits provided by oceans, often referred to as 'blue capital'.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Accounting for ocean impacts nearly doubles the social cost of carbon - Nature Climate Change Oceans provide essential ecosystem services to human society, yet the climate impacts on blue capital have long been ignored. Incorporating the latest works on ocean science and economics, researchers...

RESEARCH: Accounting for ocean impacts nearly doubles the social cost of carbon. Co-authored by Dr. William Cheung @ubccoru.bsky.social @solvingfcb.org
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Accounting for ocean impacts nearly doubles the social cost of carbon - Nature Climate Change Oceans provide essential ecosystem services to human society, yet the climate impacts on blue capital have long been ignored. Incorporating the latest works on ocean science and economics, researchers...

🌊 Accounting for ocean impacts nearly doubles the social cost of carbon

By factoring in impacts on corals, mangroves, fisheries, & ports, the 2020 blue social cost of carbon jumps to $48/ton CO2-almost doubling traditional estimates. Protecting “blue capital” matters

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Accounting for ocean impacts nearly doubles the social cost of carbon - Nature Climate Change Oceans provide essential ecosystem services to human society, yet the climate impacts on blue capital have long been ignored. Incorporating the latest works on ocean science and economics, researchers...

Accounting for ocean impacts nearly doubles the social cost of carbon www.nature.com/articles/s41... #jcampubs 🌊

Huge thanks to an amazing team of brilliant coauthors: Aburto, Brander, Cheung, Emmerling, Free, Granella, Tavoni, Verschuur, and, of course, Kate Ricke, who believed in this project.

@scrippsocean.bsky.social

Most of these damages come from non-market values: nutrition, coastal protection, and the existence value of marine ecosystems — not just market losses.

Our central estimate is $48 per ton of CO₂ (2020 USD) — which roughly doubles the SCC of the model without ocean damages. But here is a fuller comparison using other discount rates and baseline damage functions.

We integrate ocean science + economics into a country-explicit IAM (RICE50+) to estimate the blue SCC — the welfare impacts of climate change on corals, mangroves, fisheries & mariculture, and ports.

Accounting for ocean impacts nearly doubles the social cost of carbon - Nature Climate Change Oceans provide essential ecosystem services to human society, yet the climate impacts on blue capital have long been ignored. Incorporating the latest works on ocean science and economics, researchers...

The Social Cost of Carbon for the Oceans is out today in Nature Climate Change.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Until now, ocean damages have been largely missing from SCC estimates used in climate policy.

Solar radiation management looks most attractive precisely when governance is weakest — and that’s exactly when it’s most likely to fail. Check out our new paper in Environmental Research: Climate

iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

Ocean warming projected to stall expected mangrove recovery Increasing ocean temperatures will erase mangrove restoration gains expected to occur due to economic development and conservation, according to a new study from researchers at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Projections indicate that rising ocean temperatures could offset anticipated gains in global mangrove restoration by 2100, resulting in significant ecosystem and economic losses, especially in Asia. doi.org/g92dsh

Warming ocean will cost $28bn a year in mangrove losses alone - Oceanographic Continued increase in ocean temperatures is projected to stall the advances made in mangrove recovery and restoration, a new study has warned.

About 150,000 hectares (580 sq. mi.) of mangrove ecosystems, vital for coastal protection, habitat creation, carbon storage, and water quality, will be lost by the end of the century due to #climatechange, with Asia bearing nearly two-thirds of these losses.
oceanographicmagazine.com/news/warming...

Figures looked weird, so sharing again!

Ocean Warming Projected to Stall Expected Mangrove Recovery Leer en español aquiIncreasing ocean temperatures will erase mangrove restoration gains expected to occur due to economic development and conservation, according to a new study from researchers at UC ...

Press Release here: scripps.ucsd.edu/news/ocean-w...

By 2100, foregone benefits = 28B USD/year.
But uneven:

Asia 64% of losses

Middle East and Africa 18%

LatAm & Caribbean 12%

OECD 3%

Climate damages ecosystems broadly, but people don’t bear losses equally.

Together:
🌍 Socioeconomics push toward recovery.
🔥 Warming oceans stall or reverse progress.

Without climate change, mangroves could recover to global restoration targets. With warming, we lose ~150,000 ha by 2100.

Temperature matters too.

Warming helps colder sites expand. But beyond a threshold, heat damages dominate.

We identified sea surface temp of the hottest month (SSTh) as the strongest signal.

This Figure shows the marginal effect of both drivers

We find a Kuznets-like pattern: at low GDP, mangroves are often lost (deforestation/land-use change). Beyond a development threshold, protection strengthens and mangrove cover recovers. Socioeconomic growth can support conservation—but only after that threshold is crossed.

Mangroves protect coasts, store carbon & sustain fisheries. Using global data (1996–2020), we mapped mangrove extent & tracked how it responds to climate & socioeconomic drivers. Each point = 1° grid cell with mangroves.

New paper out! We looked at how warming oceans & socioeconomic change shape the future of mangroves worldwide. @ioppublishing.bsky.social

TLDR: Climate change could stall restoration efforts & deepen global inequalities.

Paper: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

GeoMIP-Pattern – a pattern scaling dataset for efficient generation of custom geoengineering scenarios - Scientific Data Scientific Data - GeoMIP-Pattern – a pattern scaling dataset for efficient generation of custom geoengineering scenarios

I'm pleased to announce our newest paper published at Scientific Data, where we establish a framework for generating fast, custom SRM scenarios. This will allow us to develop probabilístic regional and global impact studies of geoengineering interventions.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

After months held up in customs, @paulkelleher.net 's book finally made it to me. Now riding along with me on the Mexico City metro.

Claim: "Water vapor is a greenhouse gas!"
Reality: Yes, and there's more of it in a warmer atmosphere

-"CO2 is plant food!"
-pretty hard to eat when you're on fire

-"Climate has changed before!"
-We know, we told you that

-"Scientists don't know everything!"
- doesn't mean we know *nothing*

New paper!

Polycrisis isn’t a series of mistakes — it’s a tangled web of crises we navigate through increasingly rough terrain.

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Polycrisis isn’t a series of mistakes — it’s a tangled web of crises we navigate through increasingly rough terrain.
In this study, we compile a global database and analyze the co-occurrence of shocks, the building blocks of crisis, from 1970 to today.

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Very happy to be an AERE Scholar this year! I'm looking forward to contributing meaningfully to the field.