A deep-sea researcher is requested to complete a piece of a grant application that calls for a statement of the societal impact of her work in a conference room in the geology department someplace in central Europe. She investigates the microbial populations found in sediment cores that are taken from several kilometers below the ocean’s surface. The microorganisms are fascinating. They are new in terms of metabolism. Understanding how life endures under harsh conditions—possibly even on other planets—may be affected by them. It’s more difficult than the science, though, to write it on a funding form in a way that appeals to a reviewer whose duty it is to give funds for research with clear social value.
This conflict is changing which deep-sea research institutes are expanding and which are remaining stagnant as it manifests itself in research offices around Europe and the US. Anyone who has worked in or around academic science will recognize the findings of a study that looked at researchers at two European ocean science institutes: deep-sea researchers have fundamentally different and occasionally contradictory opinions about what makes their work relevant, and these differences exist even within single institutions.
Some view basic information as adequate justification, such as knowing how the ocean functions, what inhabits it, and how geological processes function at depth. Some are actively reorienting their work to focus on applicable questions. A smaller group is developing research initiatives focused on direct answers to certain societal issues, such as deep-sea mining governance or climate change monitoring.
Although there has always been pressure in research to explain societal significance, it has become more intense in the deep-sea area in particular during the last ten years due to a number of convergent factors. The ocean floor is becoming more visible in policy discussions due to commercial interest in deep-sea resources, such as polymetallic nodules, hydrothermal vent minerals, and deep-sea biological compounds with pharmaceutical potential. This is not the case when deep-sea science was mainly a matter of academic curiosity.
The deep ocean’s function in heat storage and carbon cycling is now directly related to issues that governments are funding because of climate change. Additionally, the UNESCO Ocean Decade, which runs from 2021 to 2030, has expressly framed ocean science around the idea of “the science we need for the ocean we want”—a statement that suggests research should be held accountable to societal results in ways that were not required under earlier framings.
The study’s identification of three categories of relevance articulation—fundamental, translational, and solution-oriented—is helpful since it identifies a concept that academic institutions frequently handle as a spectrum devoid of benchmarks. It’s not quite incorrect for a basic researcher to sincerely think that finding out how life survives in ocean sediment after 100 million years of dormancy is enough to justify financing. Although the importance of that knowledge may not be immediately apparent, history indicates that it eventually becomes important. However, they are working in a funding environment that increasingly demands that the “eventually” be stated up front, and the institutions gaining traction in the current funding landscape are those that are developing the capacity to make that case—to link deep-sea findings to industrial regulation, resource management, biodiversity governance, and climate policy.
The institutions that have successfully navigated this shift are intriguing because they don’t have to give up on basic research. The more successful cases involve creating what could be called a relevance infrastructure alongside the science, such as partnerships with businesses and governments that establish feedback loops between scientific questions and applied needs, policy engagement programs that link researchers to regulatory discussions, and science communication staff capable of translating findings. This infrastructure is not the result of individual researchers suddenly improving their impact statement writing skills. It results from institutional dedication to capacity building.
