New report offers early insights from the U.S. commercial fishing community on mCDR
In March and April 2025, 34 commercial fishermen and fisheries representatives met online for a series of roundtable discussions hosted through the Fishery Friendly Climate Action Campaign in collaboration with the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA) and several supporting partners. The purpose of the roundtables was to introduce participants to an emerging set of climate solutions collectively called marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR).
All proposed mCDR techniques have the potential to affect ocean ecosystems, fishery resources, and the fishing communities who depend on them, but little is known about these impacts, which could be positive, negative, or a mix of both. Moreover, no dedicated regulatory regime yet exists to set guardrails and standards for mCDR experimentation and development in the ocean or to manage their possible side effects. These reasons, combined with fishermen’s profound reliance on healthy, intact marine ecosystems, make it imperative that the fishing community have a strong and proactive voice in the shaping of mCDR.
Roundtable participants hailed from Alaska, Washington, California, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Jersey, and included fishermen from numerous fleets, fisheries, and operating scales, as well as seafood processors and representatives of fishery trade associations. To prepare, each participant watched a 42-minute video introducing mCDR techniques, the actors involved, the financing landscape, and a primer on mCDR governance and policy. Then each participant joined other participants for two two-hour sessions each, where they were guided in discussion of four broad themes: principles of responsible mCDR; mCDR governance; involvement of fishermen in co-production of knowledge; and stakeholder and community engagement.
Today we release two products from those roundtable conversations:
There’s more coming soon….
Our new reports and the community roundtables that informed them are intended to cultivate fishing industry leadership in the field of mCDR. Building on this foundation, RODA—in partnership with three regional ocean acidification networks—will also produce a set of brief, user-friendly guidance memos aimed at helping mCDR researchers, businesses, policy makers, funders, academics, NGOs, and fishermen jointly navigate the interface between fisheries and mCDR in a “fishery sensitive” manner. RODA’s “Guidance for Fishery-Sensitive mCDR” memo series will be posted in March 2026 at RODAfisheries.org.
Additionally, project collaborators will announce a webinar to share the roundtable synthesis reports and “Guidance for Fishery-Sensitive mCDR” memo series with the fishing community and the public in March 2026. Sign up to receive updates here!
