USA - NOAA's National Ocean Service releases new Five-Year Strategic Plan
The National Ocean Service (NOS) plays a critical role in our coastal communities, providing a diverse suite of products and programs that bolster, protect, and restore our resources and economy.
NOS Strategic Plan 2024-2028
NOS is stepping into a larger role relative to filling our nation’s needs for data, products, and services that protect our ecosystems and enhance climate and economic resilience. The newly released NOS Strategic Plan focuses on four overarching goals: increase U.S. coastal resilience, make equity central to our mission, accelerate growth of the Ocean Enterprise and the Blue Economy, and conserve, restore, and connect healthy coastal and marine ecosystems.
Climate change is transforming the ocean and coastal zones more rapidly than any other place on Earth. Both chronic and episodic changes are placing increasing pressure on fundamentally important economic sectors and population centers, undermining our nation’s resilience and prosperity and impacting underserved and underrepresented populations already burdened by systemic inequities and injustice.
NOS is a trusted and authoritative source of a diverse suite of products and programs that bolster, protect, and restore our natural resources and economy. To provide foundational support for our nation’s resilience in the face of these challenges, NOS is stepping into a larger role relative to filling our nation’s needs for data, products, and services that protect our ecosystems and enhance climate and economic resilience. To meet the challenges facing coastal communities, NOS focuses on four overarching goals:
1. Increase U.S. Coastal Resilience
2. Make Equity Central to Our Mission
3. Accelerate Growth of Ocean Enterprise and Blue Economy
4. Conserve, Restore, and Connect Healthy Coastal and Marine Ecosystems
Statement from Nicole LeBoeuf, Assistant Administrator for the National Ocean Service.
I am pleased and excited to share with you the new NOS strategic plan.
Coastal communities are facing a myriad of environmental and climate change threats; placing lives, livelihoods and ecosystems at risk. From sea level rise, marine debris, hurricanes and more. Our planet is changing faster in the ocean and along our coasts than anywhere else, requiring innovative and thoughtful solutions to complex challenges. Aging infrastructure and growing coastal populations exacerbate risk to communities. And all of these pressures can have a disproportionate impact on underserved and underrepresented populations.
The critical role that NOS plays in support of our coastal communities and the entire nation is needed now more than ever. NOS provides a diverse suite of products and programs that bolster, protect, and restore our natural resources and economy. We produce integral data to ensure safe and efficient maritime transportation and commerce; provide expert scientific support and response to environmental threats; manage marine protected areas; and work directly with regional and local managers to help communities prepare for the future. The services we provide play a critical role in the daily lives of tens of millions of Americans, whether they're taking a vacation at the beach or wearing sneakers that were delivered to the local mall after coming into our country via one of our ports.
Our new strategic plan focuses on meeting our nation's coastal challenges by utilizing the broad expertise across NOS program offices, playing to our strengths and uniting our workforce in common purpose more than ever in the history of the organization. This new plan focuses on four overarching priorities. Within this document are NOS-wide priority pathways and operating principles for leveraging our trusted partnerships and proven expertise to meet increasing demands for what we do across agencies, economic sectors, communities and geographies, including providing leadership on the world stage. Through the priorities and objectives laid out in this document, NOS will remain true to our workforce and our core values as they are the foundation upon which our mission and service to the nation firmly rests.
On behalf of the National Ocean Service, thank you for your interest in and contributions to the development and implementation of our new strategic plan.
