With over 2 billion people relying on the marine resources, the East Asian seas have nourished rapid economic growth over the past decades. But this comes at the expense of ocean health. Coastal-SOS - “Coastal Zones Under Intensifying Human Activities and Changing Climate: A Regional Programme Integrating Science, Management and Society to Support Ocean Sustainability”, a UN Ocean Decade endorsed project aims to provide solutions for the sustainable development of coastal ocean through effective integration of science, governance, and society. Numerical modelling is a key programmatic effort, serving synthesis analysis, mechanistic studies, and most importantly, predictions, which will contribute to construct the next generation of product: the data-model fully integrated Digital Twin Ocean. One of the expected outcomes of this project is a decision-making support system and toolbox aided by numerical modelling and the Digital Twin Ocean initiative that will result in integrated coastal management and development of marine spatial planning and ecosystem conservation practices. I will review the existing observational data and modelling work in Xiamen Bay and Changjiang Estuary which are two pilot sites and discuss plan of constructing a Digital Twin Ocean in these regions.

digital twins, China, coastal seas