US budget cuts threaten AMOC monitoring, scientists
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- The Trump administration proposed budget cuts to NASA, NOAA and NSF — agencies that together supply about 50% of total AMOC monitoring funding — and last week announced the descoping of the Ocean Observing Initiative, which had been part of the AMOC program.
- An AMOC collapse could drive climate change in Europe up to 10 times faster than today, with cascading consequences the authors list for food security, coastal flooding, storms, energy demand and migration.
- Total AMOC monitoring costs about €25 million a year — roughly five cents per EU citizen per year — a figure the authors contrast with the €1 billion Europe spends monitoring asteroids.
- The European OceanEye initiative has allocated €50 million for ocean observations, but the authors warn that research vessels servicing current observing systems must be financed, planned and packed before OceanEye is operational.
- Systematic AMOC monitoring only began two decades ago, and a recent assessment has already confirmed that funding shortfalls have reduced observing capabilities, putting several initiatives at risk of discontinuation at any moment.
- Penny Holliday, Femke de Jong and Sjoerd Groeskamp — respectively chief scientific officer of the UK's National Oceanography Centre and senior scientists at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) — are calling on the EU, UK and other international partners to build an alternative international funding strategy for sustained, open-access AMOC monitoring.
Why it matters: €25 million a year — five cents per EU citizen — maintains the AMOC monitoring system whose loss would blind Europe to a potential tenfold acceleration of regional climate change. The US supplies roughly half the current funding and is pulling back; the question is whether Europe builds an alternative or loses the two-decade benchmark dataset that climate models depend on for projections.
