It feels like every day brings a new, harrowing headline about ocean temperatures and climate change. Earlier this month, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology registered the highest ocean temperature ever recorded, the second such finding since August. It followed a steady stream that seemed to pick up pace this past summer, when NOAA predicted a historic Super El Nino. Weeks later, wildfires raged across Europe and North America, displacing hundreds of thousands. In August, a major report revealed that 2024 saw the largest single-year coral decline on record, affecting 87 per cent of reefs worldwide.

Yet lost in the swirl of headlines, one particular story stays with me – perhaps because, as a new mother in her son’s first year of life – this kind of finding is especially painful: researchers from the University of North Carolina and Penn State found that areas with more frequent and intense ocean heat waves have higher rates of childhood mortality.

The likely cause: inadequate nutrition.

As a new mother, I was shaken. As an environmental health expert, I wasn’t surprised. What is abundantly clear to me in both roles is that the fate of the ocean is inextricably tied to the future health of children everywhere, and that we cannot afford to continue down the same path.

The ocean provides protein – seafood – to more than 3 billion people. And there is plenty of research out there showing how a warming world adversely impacts the health of the most vulnerable people: children, the elderly, and those who are sick. In fact, the leading cause of weather-related mortality on land is extreme heat.

And yet, in my nearly two decades of work on climate change, both inside and outside of government, I’ve seen the health impacts of ocean heat-waves largely absent from mainstream climate discussions. In fact, the ocean is treated as an afterthought in climate policy far too often.

For example, ocean climate solutions receive less than one per cent of global climate finance – meaning of all the investments going toward addressing climate change, just one of every 100 dollars supports ocean health.

This doesn’t add up. The ocean absorbs more than 90 per cent of the excess heat generated by climate change. In fact, without the buffering effects of the ocean, the Earth’s average surface temperature would be 122°F – compared to the actual average of 59°F. It also produces half of the world’s oxygen and locks away about 30 per cent of humanity’s carbon dioxide emissions.

Meanwhile, not only are rising atmospheric temperatures resulting in more ocean heat-waves, increasing levels of greenhouse gas emission are making seawater more acidic. In short, the ocean, which has literally regulated our climate for centuries, is facing a full-on assault as we’ve all seen these past few months.