Applications are open for the Fall 2025 Masters cohort! Learn more here.

The Coastal Science and Policy Program at UC Santa Cruz is tailored for rising leaders to develop interdisciplinary solutions to global challenges facing coastal communities and ecosystems. The program prepares students to identify, innovate, and implement scalable and socially just solutions to climate, biodiversity, and other sustainability challenges in coastal zones around the world. 

The program offers two programs of study, a masters of science and a Ph.D. designated emphasis for UCSC Ph.D. students. Coursework emphasizes interdisciplinary scholarship, project-based study, and developing practical solutions to real-world problems.

The program aims to develop competency in:

• Identifying Needs, Solutions, and Priorities: Recognizing growing needs and problems within the context of coastal sustainability, identifying strategic, high impact solutions to address these needs, and prioritizing these solutions.
• Systems Thinking and Interdisciplinary Scope: Understanding connections among diverse components of physical, ecological, and social systems, and integrating them to address diverse issues.
• Process Integrity: Addressing how to protect and preserve the integrity of physical, ecological, evolutionary, social, and cultural processes.
• Practical Skills and Real World Approaches: Gaining practical skills, including communication, quantitative and qualitative analysis, problem solving, interpersonal relations, critical thinking, teamwork, mediation and consensus building, conflict resolution, leadership, fund-raising and project management. Applying these practical skills with theoretical concepts to solve real coastal issues through engagement of business, governmental and non-governmental partners and practitioners.

Leading the Way for Coastal Resilience & Sustainability

Learn how our current and past students are demonstrating their leadership across five themes:

• Coastal Resilience and Climate Change
• Conservation
• Fisheries and Aquaculture
• Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
• Innovation for Coastal Solutions

Our coasts inspire and sustain us.

From redwoods and whales to chaparral and salmon, our coasts are a treasure of biodiversity and opportunity. They are also home to 40 percent of the world’s people. Here, dense human populations, valuable economic activities, a dynamic physical environment, and high ecological diversity converge, creating complex and increasingly vulnerable ecological and socially coupled systems. A healthy coastal zone is crucial to marine and terrestrial ecosystems, human health and well-being, and the economy.

Practical and effective solutions to challenges in coastal systems are badly needed, especially in a changing global environment. The Coastal Science and Policy Program at UC Santa Cruz trains future leaders to advance the sustainable use of coastal resources and conservation of coastal biodiversity, ecosystems, socio-economic integrity, and ecological services. In Monterey Bay and beyond, CSP researchers, students, and partners are working every day to ensure a sustainable future for all who rely on the coastal zone.

Land Acknowledgment

The land on which we gather is the unceded territory of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe. The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, comprised of the descendants of indigenous people taken to missions Santa Cruz and San Juan Bautista during Spanish colonization of the Central Coast, is today working hard to restore traditional stewardship practices on these lands and heal from historical trauma.