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The Coastal Ocean Environment Summer School In Nigeria and Ghana (COESSING; https://coessing.org) has been run for one week every year since 2015. The school, an endorsed project of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030), has provided a platform for approximately 1,000 scientists from Africa, the United States, and Europe to exchange scientific knowledge, to network, to learn, and to collaborate. Our interdisciplinary, multicultural, and multi-institutional approach offers a model for knowledge exchange across the globe and across different educational levels. 

The authors present a new approach to show how interdisciplinary collaborations among a group of institutions can provide a unique opportunity for students to engage across the science-policy nexus using the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Through collaboration across seven higher education institutions in the United States and Australia, virtual student research teams worked together across disciplines. 

AbstractOceanography is by nature a global science, and thus requires a global trained workforce. Yet in many coastal nations, the number of trained professionals working in ocean science fields is lacking. Global Ocean Corps and Conveyor (GOCC), an endorsed capacity development programme of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, aims to increase the geographical and cultural diversity of the ocean science workforce through facilitating and building sustained long-term education and research collaborations between scientists around the globe. Based upon our collective experience with schools and workshops held in Ghana, Malaysia, University of Rhode Island Coastal Resources Center, and elsewhere, we are confident that a well-funded Ocean Corps would inspire large numbers of scientists, especially early-career scientists, into its ranks, thus molding many of them into champions for international capacity development for the remainder of their careers, and fostering truly global ocean science collaborations worldwide.