The Guam Ecosystem Collaboratorium

    Indo-Pacific nations are among the first to face the extreme challenges associated with global climate change. As a result, the U.S. islands, associated states, and territories of the Western Pacific face challenges that are unprecedented in their histories. Imminent impacts from climate change such as ocean acidification, coral bleaching, rising SST's, sea level rise, changing precipitation and storm regimes will be felt early and measurably in the Western Pacific. In fact, the impacts on one of the world's largest and most diverse coral reef and marine environments are already visible and are expected to continue to be profound.

  The future of the Western Pacific Region is inextricably linked to a stronger scientific and educational infrastructure and how effective we are in sustaining our local food, water and energy production, health care, ocean navigation and exploration, and ecosystem-based knowledge and management practices. Guam in particular faces many issues including an unprecedented population boom stimulated by in-migration of climate refugees, economic hopefuls of a U.S. military build-up, and is bracing itself in anticipation of the plethora of biosecurity risks associated with increased maritime traffic.

   The University of Guam and regional leaders believe that they must look to "science-based solutions" to address these issues. Like lily pads scattered across a pond, each island within Micronesia is a living-laboratory, isolated from the rest of the nation, providing enormous opportunities for researching the effects of climate change on tropical islands and their surrounding coral reef ecosystems. UOG is in the heart of this global climate laboratory and has one of the preeminent labs, the UOG Marine Laboratory, where researchers come for collaborative studies and bring students for on-site graduate education. By partnering our regional strengths with national and international partners, UOG's existing biological sciences infrastructure can provide a firm base upon which to accelerate the global effort to discover, understand, and protect these irreplaceable resources.

    As the leading Institution of higher education in Micronesia and the adjacent Indo-Pacific Region, UOG has been awarded NSF funding to serve as a research hub for this initiative.