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Day 2: Options and Opportunities • Theme: Governing Across Scales

Global science for global governance of oceanic ecosystems and fisheries (session organised by IMBER-CLIOTOP)

Olivier Maury, IRD - UMR EME, South Africa; Kathleen Miller, NCAR, Climate Science and Applications Program, USA; Raghu Murtuggude, ESSIC University of Maryland, USA; Liam Campling, School of Business and Management, University of London, UK; Olivier Aumont, IRD – UMR LPO, France

Session content: A range of processes of global social and environmental change including climate change, ocean acidification, overfishing, biodiversity loss, human population growth, increase in energy costs, and economic globalization, are impacting and connecting oceanic ecosystems and their widely distributed top predator species.

Not only does this threaten the sustainability of oceanic fisheries that support the livelihoods of coastal communities as well as distant water industrial fleets, it could also lead to regime shifts toward no-analog states with unknown effects on ecosystem services such as fisheries or carbon export.

In order to understand their dynamics, manage the associated services and formulate mitigation and adaptation strategies, oceanic ecosystems need to be studied holistically, forecasted in the Earth System framework, and governed globally. Yet, neither existing governance regimes nor scientific efforts are currently well suited for such an important task. New mechanisms and decision-support tools for global governance of oceanic ecosystems and fisheries are therefore urgently required to transition towards sustainability. Given the intricacies of this non-stationary and non linear system under multiple stressors from climate to the global political economy, such new governance mechanisms couldn't be effective without concurrent implementation of new trans-disciplinary global science for sustainability.

This session will focus on new science, new integrative models, pathways and bottlenecks towards the global governance of social-ecological oceanic systems for sustainability. It will emphasize the necessary interactions between policy and science and target both scientists (e.g. the IMBER-CLIOTOP community) and policy makers involved in oceanic fisheries management at national and international (e.g. RFMOs) levels.