Reports and guidance memos offers early insights from the 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.
Synthesis reports
In February 2026, we released two products from those roundtable conversations:
Guidance memos
Building on the foundation of our roundtables, RODA—in partnership with three regional ocean acidification networks— produced 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. Read RODA’s “Guidance for Fishery-Sensitive mCDR” memo series.
Webinar
Join us on March 24 at 3:30 pm Eastern for a webinar to share the roundtable “Guidance for Fishery-Sensitive mCDR” memo series with the fishing community and the public in March 2026. Register here.
