The UN declared the 2021–2030 as the Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (Ocean Decade). The Ocean Decade's vision is to “develop scientific knowledge, build infrastructure and foster relationships for a sustainable and healthy ocean.” The Ocean Decade aims to achieve six societal outcomes: (1) A clean ocean, through identifying and removing sources of pollution; (2) A healthy and resilient ocean, with mapped and protected marine ecosystems; (3) A predicted ocean, enabling society to understand current and future ocean conditions; (4) A safe ocean, protecting people from ocean hazards; (5) A sustainably harvested ocean, providing food and resources for the blue economy; and (6) A transparent ocean, giving citizens equitable access to data, information and technologies. It also aims to provide concrete scientific support to coastal management, adaptation and restoration, marine spatial planning, marine protected areas, fisheries management, sustainable expansion of the blue economy, nationally determined contributions to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), national ocean policies, development of national Research and Development (R&D), capacity development, and early warning systems.The Ocean Decade offers the ocean science community a unique opportunity to change the way we support sustainable development and galvanize ocean sciences for the future (Ryabinin et al., 2019). In addition, the UN Decade for Ecosystem Restoration (2021–2030), gives the ocean science community an imperative to work toward a sustainable future for the ocean.We challenge the marine ecosystem modeling community to address how we: (i) enable ocean managers and decision-makers to use our science, (ii) communicate our science, and most importantly (iii) ensure co-design of our science to achieve sustainable development. For this, we define ecosystem models as those that span physical and human drivers of change in the full ecosystem from plankton to top predators.
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