Sarah Schumann caught up with two of the lead scientists of WHOI’s LOC-NESS ocean alkalinity enhancement field trial in the Gulf of Maine: Adam Subhas and Jennie Rheuban. She was curious to hear how the experiment went from their standpoint, what kind of data they had collected, and what preliminary results they were ready to share from the field trial.

Sarah Schumann was a fishing industry observer on the August 2025 LOC-NESS ocean alkalinity enhancement field trial in the Gulf of Maine, in which WHOI engineers released 16,500 gallons of sodium hydroxide solution dyed with rhodamine tracer into surface waters to assess potential for carbon removal. Read her field notes here.

At our May 28 webinar on “Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal: What Fishermen Need to Know,” a panel of four commercial fishermen and fisheries representatives reflected on their participation earlier this spring in a set of roundtables hosted through the Fishery Friendly Climate Action Campaign to support this project.

Commercial fishermen, seafood businesses, and fisheries representatives are invited to join a Thought Leadership Forum on Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal (mCDR). This is an opportunity to collaborate with other dedicated fisheries stakeholders to set the tone for industry engagement in the field of mCDR.

The final day of the Ocean Visions finished with a plenary session where panelists and audience members took turns at the mic to reflect on the three-day experience and share their visions for what comes next. A number of these comments focused on the fourth pillar of the Ocean Visions network’s agenda to confront the ocean-climate crisis: Reach. Ocean Visions recently added its “Reach” pillar to the other three pillars in its strategy (Remove, Repair, and Reduce) to ensure that “a wide array of diverse perspectives and backgrounds are fully engaged in pursuit of solutions.”

As the field of marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) jumps from the laboratory into the field, can it advance in a way that avoids crushing coastal communities? That was the unspoken question at the heart of a panel discussion on “Working with Communities at the Ocean-Science Nexus” at the Ocean Visions Summit in Vancouver, BC earlier this week.

I came here on a reconnaissance mission to understand one particular set of ocean climate solutions: those categorized as marine carbon dioxide removal, or mCDR. Who is leading the charge on mCDR, how fast is the field moving, and what key governance and engagement onramps exist for injecting fishing community priorities into the conversation?

Despite our lack of familiarity with this subject, now is the time to learn what it’s all about, and to work together as an industry to define and advocate for a version of mCDR that is “fishery sensitive” — perhaps even “fishery friendly.”