On Monday, February 27, the Nereus Program will hold a seminar along with UBC’s Green College on the topic of “The Human Dimension of Marine Conservation.”
4:30-5pm – Meet and greet coffee and pastries reception
5-6pm – Session
6-6:30pm – Q&A
This seminar is free and open to the public.
David Gill, The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC)
David’s research focuses on identifying linkages between marine protected area (MPA) governance, human well-being, and ecosystem health. The SESYNC Pursuit with which he is affiliated, Solving the Mystery of MPA Performance, brings together an interdisciplinary team of researchers and data from MPAs from around the world to identify key trends between MPAs and their social and ecological impacts. This work, spearheaded by the World Wildlife Fund, aims to inform marine conservation policy and strengthen a culture of evaluation in the conservation sector.
The Human Dimension of Marine Conservation
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are prime challenges for the international communities to implement. The SDGs are presented as independent goals to be met by the international community. However, many of these global targets are co-dependent, and identifying the relationships between targets can enable strategies to achieve simultaneous success. We propose to identify the co-benefits of strategies by identifying what targets are effectively addressed by strategies aimed at other targets.
Recently, an analysis of global progress toward achieving SDGs highlighted the lack of progress on SDG 14: Life Below Water (this is the only SDG goal with no targets achieved). Yet, the ocean is integral to many aspects of sustainable development, being an important source of food and other raw materials, and being important for cultures around the world. We focus on characterizing the dependencies of SDGs on the targets for achieving a sustainable ocean. Ultimately we like to develop this map to be used as the guide for international policy development as well as reveal the opportunity for the global community to achieve transformative pathways of sustainable development.
Gerald Singh, Nereus Program, UBC
Gerald Singh is a Nereus Fellow working with Yoshitaka Ota and Andres Cisneros-Montemayor and collaborating with the United Nations Development Programme. Gerald is characterizing the contribution of a sustainable ocean to achieving broad sustainable development goals. Using the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a framework, Gerald is researching how the SDGs are dependent on achieving sustainable use and management of the ocean.
Co-benefits and trade-offs between Ocean Sustainability (SDG 14: Life Below Water) and other Sustainable Development Goals
This lecture presents a framework for identifying the dependencies (co-benefits) and hindrances (trade-offs) among path-dependent relationships. This framework was used to characterize the contributions of the ocean sustainability targets (SDG 14: “Life Below Water”) to other SDG targets. The state of global oceans limits the potential to achieve far-reaching sustainability objectives (e.g. [AC1] Sumaila et al. 2016; Pauly et al. 2002), yet this is currently the SDG with least identified progress (GESI [AC2] 2016), and has received the least financial support (ref financial report). Our framework can be used to explore relationships among other SDG targets or similar multi-goal policies (e.g. Convention on Biological Diversity Aichi Targets), and can be modified to specific contexts (such as national or regional scales). In particular, this framework allows for an understanding of the prevalence of positive versus negative relationships between ocean sustainability and other SDGs.
