Ben Halpern wants us to prove him wrong

Feature

By Sonia Fernandez
Photo by Matt Perko

Ben Halpern hopes he isn’t right, not about this. When the time comes — a scant 25 years from now — the marine ecologist would much rather look back on this era as the moment we decided to band together and avert disaster. It could be remembered as the time we, through collective and consistent action, slowed the accelerating degradation of the ocean and helped prevent the environmental, economic and food security crises that might otherwise have followed.

“We’ll have gotten it wrong in the sense that we fixed it before this happened,” he says. “And I think that that’s possible.”

Alas, for now, we don’t have the luxury of such hindsight. And the data is sobering: In a recent study published in the journal Science, Halpern and fellow scientists at UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) predict that cumulative human impacts on the ocean could double between now and midcentury. In some places they could triple, driven primarily by ocean warming and heavy fishing, but also by other factors such as pollution.

That human impacts on the ocean were increasing was not surprising, given the current age of global warming and its myriad effects, such as habitat loss and sea level rise, Halpern says. What was a surprise is the accelerated rate of change between now and 2050. We’re at a dangerous threshold.

And yet, these threats are hard to fathom in large part because the ocean seems so big, so enduring. For tens of thousands of years, humans have leaned on the ocean for sustenance, for commerce and culture. And for tens of thousands of years, the ocean has been abundant. Its wild environs have yielded food and material, while regulating temperatures, providing oxygen and generally absorbing everything humans could throw at it.

However, below the surface, things are different.

Finding his place

Halpern first got a taste of these unsavory changes early in his career at UCSB, after following a circuitous path toward his discipline. “Growing up in Oregon, the last place I ever thought I would be was Southern California, let alone Santa Barbara, which from Oregon looked like Southern California to me,” he says. He attended the small, liberal arts Carleton College in the Midwest, and followed that up with a stint in Boston — a job at MIT that had nothing to do with oceans, but gave him Friday afternoons “to go do something different.” He spent that extra time at the New England Aquarium, where he fell in love with the institution’s mission of education and conservation.

“They have this center tank that’s three stories tall and something like 50 feet wide, and it’s all a coral reef system. It’s this really amazing, inspired place,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘This is what I want to do. I want to be involved in places and in work that helps save the oceans.’”

With this plan in mind, a 24-year-old Halpern set out to apply to graduate schools, and UCSB’s marine biology graduate program popped up on his radar. It was one of the best in the country, and he was fortunate enough to get accepted to work at UCSB’s Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology with coral reef ecologist Professor Robert Warner.

That was obviously the main motivation, he says, but what cinched the deal was that oh-so-California thing that gets everyone who visits Santa Barbara: the weather.

He went on to complete his doctoral work in 2003, then joined NCEAS as a research scientist. It was then a young institute, tasked with the brand-new mission of synthesizing a growing body of disparate, scattered ecological data in search of global patterns and big-picture insights.

“Some oceanographers and atmospheric scientists were trying to build global models of how processes work,” Halpern says. “But from an ecological and a human impacts line of inquiry, this idea of being able to ask things at a global scale was pretty new.” While ecologists around the world had mastered the techniques behind studying local and regional processes and relationships, they were still limited in their ability to examine the entire Earth as a complex series of interlocking ecologies. In bringing scientists and data from all over the world together and leveraging the power of the internet and data science, it was now possible to ask and answer the burning big-picture questions.

“Once you start being able to look at things at a global scale, all of a sudden your results become relevant to anyone on the planet,” he says. “The idea that you can pull back and see things on our whole planet at once is really both humbling and inspiring at the same time.”

The ocean’s voice

It was with this new perspective that Halpern and collaborators first tackled the question of human impacts on the ocean, taking everything into account, from greenhouse gases in the air to pollution runoff from the land to habitat degradation and overfishing in the waters. The results of the landmark study, published in 2008, were a shock to everyone: Almost half of the world’s oceans were heavily affected by human impacts, and very little, if any of it, was untouched by human activity.

Halpern and team were unprepared for the level of attention their paper would receive. Even before the Feb. 14, 2008, press conference at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston to announce their findings, they were bombarded with media requests from all over the world. During the meeting and for days after, they did interview after interview after interview for stories that filled the global news cycle.

“Friends in Africa were hearing the news story during a taxi ride,” Halpern recalled. “Friends in London saw it on the front page of a newspaper. It was just everywhere.”

The paper itself made a huge splash in scientific circles, garnering citation after citation — illustrating the hunger the ecological community had for this global perspective and providing a foundation for a slew of research papers to build upon. Hundreds of papers have cited that study each year since it was published, for a total of 8,177 citations and growing. The work helped put NCEAS on the map, and cemented Halpern’s reputation as a leader in the field.

Fast forward to today, and Halpern, who became the executive director of NCEAS in 2016, continues his work following the effects of global human activity. His projects have unlocked the often difficult-to-discern impacts of and relationships within the global food system; assessed the health of the world’s oceans; mapped areas of biodiversity; and studied the effectiveness of marine protected areas. His research has painted a picture of how we humans, collectively, impact the Earth’s ecological systems.

To fulfill NCEAS’s mission and extract insights and tease out large-scale patterns that can’t be seen from individual, local or regional studies, Halpern leans on the power of inclusion, creating an environment of collaboration, away from the siloed science that is often conducted at research institutions. “I’ve put a lot of effort into building a community that embraces all types of people and all types of thinking, and supports an open mindset approach to do this really powerful research,” he says.

NCEAS is a destination for ecologists and environmental scientists who want to get together, master the data and gain deep understanding of the big issues (and also visit Santa Barbara). In turn, working with NCEAS, the global community of environmental scientists has become more open, collaborative, interdisciplinary and synthetic, changing the culture and practice of environmental science. To bring the momentum of big data team science into the next generation, Halpern has launched AI for the Planet, an initiative that teaches scientists how to harness the power of artificial intelligence to drive insight, while learning how to use it responsibly.

“Any individual action can feel so tiny compared to the scale of the problem,” Halpern says, “but if you collectively sum up thousands or millions of people's individual actions, it suddenly becomes a force of change that can make a really big difference at a global scale.”

‘A force of change’

The 2025 paper on the accelerating human impact to the ocean is a continuation of the 2008 paper, using the latest data to get a sense of the speed and trajectory at which these impacts are accumulating. Just like the 2008 work, the more recent results are worse than initially anticipated, with important implications for food security, environmental health and global trade. The world’s coasts, where populations are increasing rapidly relative to inland areas, are expected to see most of the consequences of this human impact, whether it’s the sea level rise that’s claiming oceanfront homes, the diminishing ocean recreation opportunities thanks to habitat loss, or smaller catches due to overfishing. The tropics and the poles, meanwhile, will experience the most rapid rate of change.

For someone whose job it is to monitor the ocean as it bows under the weight of human activity, it can become a little much.

“I definitely have my difficult days,” Halpern says. “I don’t want to sugarcoat the challenges of this work. And it’s not just the ocean; other parts of the environment are experiencing severe impacts as well. So I’m not alone in this challenge, this journey navigating how to stay optimistic and positive despite a lot of evidence otherwise.”

But the oceans are different, he points out. Unlike with terrestrial systems, humans don’t live in the ocean, so while implementing large-scale strategies and solutions still requires a lot of work, doing so is typically easier in the ocean without the complications of property ownership and property rights that can impede land-based environmental projects.

“Also, ocean ecosystems have kind of a built-in resilience in the way that a lot of ocean species have evolved to interact with ocean currents,” Halpern says. Carried by the currents, he explains, most marine species’ larvae are spit out into the ocean and end up dozens to thousands of miles away from where they were born in a dispersal that makes it possible for even severely degraded, barren areas to recover, thanks to newcomers from far away.

The challenge, he says, is actually for humanity to pull back. “If we give the ocean a little space to breathe, I think it’ll come back. I think it’ll recover in a way that is much harder on land.”

So what does it mean for those of us who live near, love and rely upon the ocean? The seeds of the answer lie in the problem itself: If it took a series of relatively small actions in different areas all over the world to coalesce and create the degradation of the ocean, the same can be true for ocean recovery. In addition to targeted, large-scale projects, individuals can also assist in ocean recovery with the choices we make in our daily lives.