September 26, 2025 — By 2050, the combined impacts of climate change and human activity on the ocean could be two to three times greater than they are today. Without urgent efforts to reduce these threats, a new study from the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis—an independent research affiliate of the University of California, Santa Barbara—warns those forces could completely transform, or even wipe out, entire seascapes.
“Huge parts of the ocean will no longer be recognizable,” said Ben Halpern, lead author of the study and the research center’s director. “There are areas that will effectively just collapse and cease to be functioning as natural systems.”
For more than 20 years, Halpern, a marine ecologist, has been charting the ways humans are reshaping coastlines and oceans. In 2008, he produced one of the first global maps to pinpoint where marine ecosystems were under the most stress at the time. Since then, he said, he has emphasized the need to look ahead and project how global warming, along with other human-driven pressures, like industrial fishing, shipping, land-based agriculture and coastal development, are likely to intensify and converge.