Marine environments worldwide are in serious decline due primarily to over-harvesting, pollution, disease and climate change. In many locations around the world, human induced stresses to marine ecosystems have exceeded their regenerative capacity, causing dramatic shifts in species composition and ecosystem states that result in severe economic and social costs.
New approaches to the global marine crisis
Anticipating and preventing unwanted regime shifts (or, conversely, promoting desirable ones) will require improved understanding of the complex dynamics and processes that support or undermine resilience and of the socio-economic drivers and governance systems that shape the use of living marine resources and services.
Responding to the global marine crisis requires new approaches that focus on supporting and sustaining ecosystem resilience. Such approaches contest current management and metrics and stress the significance of multilevel adaptive governance systems for marine and aquaculture management.
Such governance systems need features that can deal with cross-scale socio-economic drivers of globalisation that cause coastal and marine vulnerability.
Research in this theme will focus on:
- understanding the spatial dynamics, cross-scale effects, time-lags and feedbacks that influence marine resilience and identifying important functional groups of organisms that contribute to resilience;
- analysing the links and dependence of human populations on marine resources by identifying key ecosystems and their associated goods and services as well as resource users, identifying current management structures and their strengths and weaknesses, and exploring novel institutional approaches and governance structures;
- exploring new ways to incorporate incentives across scales that prevent overexploitation of marine resources and address multi-level governance systems of fisheries and aquaculture that support resilience in marine social-ecological systems.
