Through OceániCO₂ Labs, Ocean Visions Fellow Catalina Reyes Vargas is Charting a Path for mCDR from Latin America
Catalina is a Colombian biologist and microbiologist leading efforts to restore ocean ecosystems and address climate change challenges in Colombia’s unique bi-oceanic and culturally diverse landscape through innovative approaches, and the support of prominent partners like Universidad de los Andes.
Nestled at the intersection of the Caribbean and Pacific Oceans, Colombia’s coastlines represent a living territory, inseparable from traditional governance, cultural identity, and ways of understanding the world. In addition to being a source of food and income for local communities, its unique bi-oceanic position plays a critical role in shaping climate regulation, safeguarding some of the world’s most carbon-rich ecosystems, and, increasingly, facing outsized exposure to extreme weather.
These factors also make Colombia one of the most scientifically and politically dynamic places to act on climate change. Ocean Visions Ocean-Climate Innovation Fellow Catalina Reyes Vargas has spent more than a decade working at that intersection. Trained in biology and microbiology, with advanced degrees in public policy and international relations, she served as Colombia’s international negotiator for ocean affairs at the Ministry of Environment before moving into independent advocacy. Her work, by her own description, sits “in the middle.”
That middle position has shaped her career, and it has also manifested a persistent institutional gap. For years, bringing the ocean-climate nexus into substantive conversation with the communities and institutions that govern Colombia’s coasts meant working without a clear institutional home, without an established methodology, and without a peer network organized around the same challenge.
Building an Institution from the Inside
In early 2024, Reyes Vargas applied to Ocean Visions’ call for hub leaders as part of its Global Ecosystem for Ocean Solutions (GEOS) program. Her proposal was accepted and formally endorsed by the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, joining a global network of hubs spanning Costa Rica, Chile, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, South Africa, and Tanzania.
What began as the Colombia Ocean-Climate Innovation Hub has since grown into OceániCO₂ Labs, a registered ‘think-and-do’ tank based in Bogotá, with collaborators across Latin America.
OceániCO₂ Labs is designed to build ocean-climate capacity from the conditions of the region itself. Its work draws on participatory action research, social mapping, coastal makerspace pilots, and community science programs already underway on Colombia’s Pacific and Caribbean coasts. The aim is to create the scientific, institutional, and social basis for the evaluation of emerging ocean-climate technologies in ways that are relevant to coastal communities, public authorities, and regional decision-makers.
We realized that people will not support what they do not understand, and they will not understand what they were never part of building.
mCDR and Its Assumptions
At the center of Reyes Vargas’ current work is marine carbon dioxide removal, or mCDR: a set of approaches under exploration to determine whether the ocean’s natural carbon cycle can be safely and durably enhanced to remove additional carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The ocean already holds roughly fifty times more carbon than the atmosphere and has absorbed about a quarter of the CO₂ humans have emitted since the industrial revolution. mCDR research asks whether that capacity can be enhanced through approaches such as increasing seawater alkalinity, which can help the ocean take up more CO₂, or stimulating biological processes that move carbon from surface waters into long-term storage.
If some of these options prove viable, scalable, and ecologically safe, they could contribute to carbon removal at a relevant scale. That possibility has made mCDR an increasingly relevant area of scientific and policy attention.
The concept carries assumptions that require additional scrutiny. mCDR debates usually start from technical premises like that the ocean systems can be optimized, that carbon can be satisfactorily standardized as a unit of exchange, and that research practices and models mostly developed in temperate settings can travel across latitudes unchanged.
Colombia’s coast is tropical, highly biodiverse, and governed in part by Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities with protected rights over coastal and marine territories. This complexity is amplified by governance gaps across entities: multiple state institutions and sectors hold various obligations, but they do not always communicate or coordinate effectively with one another, a situation further complicated by private interests and the dynamics of armed conflict. Bringing mCDR research into this context is a matter of working across different ways of knowing and governing the sea, so that what gets tested is scientifically rigorous and genuinely relevant for local communities.
Different Ways of Knowing the Ocean
For many Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities on the Pacific coast, the ocean is not a carbon reservoir to be measured and managed. These communities are not offering different opinions about the same resource; they are working from different reference points about what the resource is. The term “carbon removal” is often perceived as a foreign technical concept and often elicits a question about authority: who gets to study, intervene in, or modify the sea? Working effectively across that gap demands more than just a different vocabulary. It requires a reframe in methodology.
Colombia’s coastal governance reflects the same multiplicity in concrete institutional form. Any ocean-climate initiative must engage national ministries, regional environmental authorities, and the autonomous governments of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, all against a backdrop of acute socioeconomic inequality. For Reyes Vargas, none of this is a constraint to engineer around. It is the heart of the work. mCDR research that overlooks these realities risks producing findings that are not grounded in local realities and pilots that lose social license before they begin.
The Catalyst, Not the Maker
The GEOS Ocean-Climate Innovation Fellowship offered Reyes Vargas more than funding or visibility. It helped her understand where she fits in a complex ecosystem. Scientists run the experiments at the bench, and legislators draft the bills, but neither group alone can carry a solution to the communities where it has to take root. That work of translation, of binding the parts together, is hers.
Through the fellowship, the network around that middle position became visible and operational. Reyes Vargas participated in the Ocean Visions Biennial Summit and the UN Ocean Conference and was invited by the South Korean government to the Our Ocean Conference in Busan, carrying a Latin American perspective into global forums where it had been largely absent. She also traveled extensively along Colombia’s Pacific and Caribbean coasts, grounding her strategy in the realities of the communities the work is meant to serve.
For the first time, all of the ideas, all of the certainties and uncertainties in my head, all the passions and convictions I have — they met in one place, and were supported by such an amazing network.
The fellowship also changed how she is received in policy spaces. As the founder and executive coordinator of a UN Decade–endorsed initiative connected to a broader scientific network, she now arrives at meetings with ministers, vice ministers, and coastal decision-makers with institutional standing she did not previously hold.
The structural backing has only amplified her impact. She is still the connector, now able to approach from a stronger position. “I was able, for the first time, to realize I’m a leader of something new,” she says, “but also something absolutely vital to my country and my region.”
Toward a Latin American Approach to mCDR, on Latin American Terms
OceániCO₂ Labs is now advancing on two parallel tracks. The first is technical and policy engagement with coastal decision-makers on both the Pacific and Caribbean coasts — environmental ministries, regional authorities, and the agencies responsible for water treatment, desalination, and disaster risk — building toward field-level case studies in marine carbon removal and restorative aquaculture. Such case studies are still largely absent in tropical, multi-jurisdictional contexts, and the data and governance precedents they generate will matter well beyond Colombia’s borders.
The second is science communication. Through TikTok and Instagram, and a regional network of environmental creators selected by TikTok across Latin America and the Caribbean, Reyes Vargas reaches audiences ranging from Indigenous community leaders to those encountering mCDR for the first time, “always making sure it’s understandable and precise to all of the different audiences.”
She has also launched the Colombian Negative Emissions Initiative, a national initiative to build the technical and governance infrastructure needed to evaluate — and where appropriate, pilot — mCDR approaches. It is, she says, the culmination of everything the GEOS program and OceániCO₂ Labs have been building toward. It is based primarily on academic collaboration between top universities and productive sectors to demonstrate, from technical and economic perspectives, the scenarios under which carbon negativity can take shape in the country.
More than seventy percent of Latin America’s population lives along the coast. In these places, the ocean is woven into the fabric of social and economic life, and any effort to intervene in ocean systems carries implications that extend well beyond technical performance. For mCDR, the question is not only whether it can be made to work, but whether it can be developed in ways that align with the relationships people already have with the sea, rather than override them.
When Reyes Vargas joined the GEOS program, she had worked for years at an intersection that had no institutional home or peer network. Today, she leads a UN-endorsed think-and-do tank, with international collaborators helping to define what responsible ocean-climate work looks like on a coast unlike most.
And she is no longer doing it alone.
