Over the last decade, Australian marine science has benefited from the development and implementation of Australia’s first National Marine Science Strategy 2015-25. This has motivated the National Marine Science Committee’s (NMSC) to spend the last 12 months developing a new decadal strategy.
The process began with a two-day workshop involving senior representatives of NMSC’s 43 members (Commonwealth and State Departments and Agencies, research organizations and universities) which prioritized key “Societal Benefit Areas” that will require significant marine science and innovation inputs over the next decade.
Having defined the requirements and context for marine science, the workshop then mapped 24 priority science foci (e.g. climate change, food security, sovereignty, renewable energy….). Most of these focal areas have mature science communities that the NMSC could draw on to develop a sector-wide strategy to increase investment, impact, and coordinate actions.
We also recognised that much has changed in the past decade, with emerging technologies, expanding technical capabilities and promising new fields of science (e.g. robotics, AI, omics, synthetic biology) coming on-line. These will undoubtedly change the marine science landscape over the next decade. In addition to these new frontiers, NMSC recognized the importance of incorporating inputs from outside the traditional STEM disciplines in the new Strategy – e.g. ocean literacy, social sciences, ocean accounting, integrated marine management, and traditional knowledge.
Having developed the broad scope of input required for the Strategy, the NMSC invited the marine science community, and several groups in the social science domains, to collaborate on the development of white papers to inform our new decadal Strategy. We were excited to receive over 500 expressions of interest, spread across the 21 different topics. A particularly pleasing element of the response was the significant interest from early career researchers – something that was missing a decade earlier.
As we write this abstract the deadline for submission of Draft White Papers is near. Leaders of each white paper will present their findings and conclusions at a National Marine Science Symposium in Canberra on 18-19 June, 2025. The Symposium will bring together the science community leadership with a broad range of private and public sector end users with the objective of refining and prioritizing the key recommendations of each white paper, and ultimately the Strategy.
The AMSA Conference provides us an opportunity to present and discuss these recommendations with a large section of the marine science community prior to finalization and publication of the Strategy. The Strategy will be launched at Parliament House in early November and white papers will be published shortly thereafter.