Wednesday June 7, 2023
Oregon State University —
An Oregon State University researcher has been awarded a three-year, $1.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to lead a study about the movement of fish stocks due to changing climate conditions and the potential geopolitical tensions that could result from that shift.
“Fisheries that exist today in the U.S. may move to Canadian or even Russian waters in 20 years,” said James Watson, an associate professor in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and the project’s principal investigator. “We will be exploring ways to measure those changes and the potential consequences of those changes, economically and politically, particularly in the Arctic and Pacific oceans.”
The grant, from the Department of Defense’s Minerva Research Initiative, is one of 11 selected from 130 applications based on scientific merit, relevance and potential impact. The initiative’s focus is on basic research in social and behavioral sciences on topics relevant to national security.
Watson’s project is titled: “Future Fish Wars: Chasing Ocean Ecosystem Wealth.” The research team includes Steven Mana‘oakamai Johnson, who earned his doctorate at Oregon State and is now faculty at Cornell University; Sarah Glaser of the World Wildlife Fund; Cullen Hendrix of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and economist Ethan Addicott of the University of Exeter.