BAMOS February 2026
12 Article
Our Future Oceans: Inside Australia’ s new national ARC Centre of Excellence
Laure Poncet, University of New South Wales( l. poncet @ unsw. edu. au)
Ocean waves, Queensland, Australia. Credit: Nathan Cowley via Pexels
This year will mark the launch of the first national research centre dedicated to understanding and safeguarding Australia’ s rapidly changing oceans, the Australian Research Council( ARC) Centre of Excellence for Our Future Oceans.
Awarded $ 35 million in funding in late 2025, the new Centre will commence its operations later this year and will be hosted at UNSW Sydney, with four partner universities: the University of Tasmania, the University of Western Australia, the Australian National University, and the University of Queensland.
Australia’ s oceans are changing at an unprecedented rate, with ocean warming, sea-level rise, coastal erosion, storm surges, and shifts in ocean circulation posing a serious threat to marine ecosystems, industries, and coastal communities.
The ARC Centre of Excellence for Our Future Oceans will bring together Australia’ s leading marine universities to investigate these changes and develop the solutions and innovations needed to address current and future challenges.
Speaking ahead of the Centre’ s commencement, Scientia Professor Matthew England, the Director of the Centre, said:
“ Our centre will generate new ocean knowledge, data tools, and high-resolution projections to enable effective and better-informed decision-making, while also training the next generation of highly skilled ocean scientists.”
The impact of extreme events, such as marine heatwaves, toxic algal blooms and storm surges, involves physical, biological and geochemical processes occurring across a variety of scales, with existing models often lacking the resolution to capture them.
At the heart of the Centre’ s activity will be the development of Australia’ s first cross-scale observational programs and highresolution ocean modelling systems, which will integrate largescale ocean dynamics with fine-scale processes occurring near the shoreline.
“ This new approach will allow us to simulate ocean physics and biogeochemistry from the open ocean to the coast, where extreme events often cause the greatest damage. This will enhance resilience in our marine communities at the national and local scales.”
The Centre will bring together 29 Chief Investigators and 28 Partner Investigators and collaborate with key national organisations, including CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, the Australian Institute of Marine Science and Geoscience Australia. The Centre will also partner with the ARC Centre of Excellence for 21st Century Weather in areas of mutual interest,