International Journal of Environmental Science and Development

Abstract—The world’s oceans which serve an important function in regulating anthropogenically driven climate change are rapidly degraded due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon emission and concentration linked to human activities. Particularly threatened are marine phytoplankton communities which constitute a significant part of the global climate control system. The main purpose of this paper is to address this critical issue by raising environmental awareness concerning the inextricable relationship between ocean carbon sink, climate change and human long-term existence based on a scientific assessment of the ecological functions of the oceans. This is expected to prompt human urgency to work towards arresting the increasing anthropogenic pressures exerted on the oceans. It also further considers the role of environmental ethics to guide, inspire and motivate individuals to act against further deterioration of our oceans. It is concluded that raising environmental awareness and promoting the ethics of sustainable resource use constitute one of the major keys in arresting further impoverishment of the health of our oceans.

Index Terms—Ocean sustainability, climate change, ocean carbon sink, biological carbon pump, anthropocentrism, ecocentrism.

Choy Yee Keong is with the Faculty of Economics, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan (e-mail: choy3293@gmail.com).

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Cite: Choy Yee Keong, "The Ocean Carbon Sink and Climate Change: A Scientific and Ethical Assessment," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 10, no. 8, pp. 246-251, 2019.

Copyright © 2019 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).