Ocean Partnerships Highlighted during Capitol Hill Ocean Week

On Tuesday, June 9, the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation convened the 2020 Capitol Hill Ocean Week (CHOW) conference, which centered on the importance of partnerships to promote biodiversity. Biodiversity in the oceans and Great Lakes supports economic, social, and environmental health by maintaining stable ecosystems, enhancing tourism and recreation experiences, and providing humans with medicinal resources. Speakers at CHOW 2020 emphasized the importance of a range of partnerships at local, regional, and global scales for advancing the policies and science that protect ocean and Great Lake biodiversity.

International Partnerships

Global leaders highlighted the importance of international partnerships in the Global Action for Ocean, Climate, and Biodiversity plenary. Despite the postponement of this year’s United Nations climate change meeting (COP26) due to the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders assured CHOW attendees that the international community is still working collaboratively to promote ocean and environmental health.

The speakers also emphasized the importance of partnerships between civil society, governments, and international bodies in contributing to the global knowledge base and in implementing solutions. Dr. Anne Larigauderie, Executive Secretary of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), said that IPBES and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) depend on scientists volunteering their time and research to collaborate on writing reports, and that the pandemic has made her more conscious of the importance of international and cross-sectoral cooperation. Shifting to remote work has also facilitated some of these partnerships; successful online planning sessions have led IPBES to consider moving some future events online to increase the ease with which partners can collaborate.

International partnerships are especially critical for protecting the high seas—areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJs) that account for over two-thirds of the global ocean. The immense biomass of the high seas attracts industry, and, in recent years, overfishing of ABNJs has led to a rapid decline in marine life. According to Sophie Mirgaux, Belgium’s Special Envoy for the Ocean, the technology for monitoring illegal activity in the high seas is ready, but a lack of political will has prevented development of widespread protective measures. One promising step towards enhancing international cooperation on governance of the high seas, however, is the work of the United Nations Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, the first UN conference to address biodiversity in the high seas. Negotiation sessions for this conference began in 2018, but the most recent session has been postponed due to COVID-19.

Local Partnerships

CHOW 2020 speakers stressed that partnerships at the local level are equally important for preserving ocean and Great Lake biodiversity. As Vera Metcalf, Director of the Eskimo Walrus Commission (EWC), stated, co-management of natural resources is often successful because it combines the knowledge systems of local people with large-scale government and scientific bodies to find workable approaches to sustainability. Metcalf notes that place-based knowledge, especially in the case of indigenous peoples, cannot be discounted when developing environmental management strategies. In Metcalf’s work, she collaborates with different partners to ensure food security and sustainability for Alaska’s indigenous people.

Local education remains paramount to ocean and Great Lake conservation. Margaret Leinen, Director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, believes that public understanding of the ocean must be core to the missions of all oceanographic institutions; without social support, scientific efforts can only accomplish so much. To that end, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography connects with local audiences through their public aquarium, which offers interactions with wildlife and fosters an appreciation for the marine world. Local partnerships such as these can be challenging to expand to a global scale, but are crucial to biodiversity conservation efforts.

Scientific Partnerships

On November 19, 2019, the White House issued a Presidential Memorandum on the need to map and explore the United States’ shorelines and Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). According to Timothy Gallaudet, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and Deputy Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), this initiative will be completed through science and technology partnerships with ocean-focused companies, researchers, and nonprofits. Gallaudet highlighted three groups partnering with NOAA to produce innovative ocean research and monitoring: Ocean X, the Schmidt Ocean Institute, and the Ocean Tracking Network.

Increased ocean mapping and monitoring will help improve understanding of ocean ecosystems and habitats and how the ocean is affected by and responds to climate change. Access to maps would also help ensure that human activities in the ocean, such as offshore wind installations, are conducted with as minimal ecosystem disruption as possible. By partnering with independent research groups, NOAA plans to connect the expertise and resources of the agency with the innovative technologies developed in the private sector. These technologies include unmanned mapping vehicles, artificial intelligence-driven tools that have allowed research to continue amid the pandemic, and acoustic tags that track marine species while also monitoring ocean conditions.

In many cases, the groups partnering with NOAA are also working to facilitate partnerships between ocean researchers. The Ocean Tracking Network, for example, is a platform designed for researchers based around the world to share data to leverage each other’s assets, thereby gaining a wider perspective on marine conditions. The Schmidt Ocean Institute also works to increase collaboration among scientists. It makes data from its research ship Falkor freely available worldwide on the condition that scientists make their findings using that data publicly available as well.

Since the ocean spans the majority of the planet’s surface, protecting, monitoring, conserving, and understanding marine biodiversity requires collaboration from a wide network of actors. As Vidar Helgesen, Former Norwegian Minister of Climate and the Environment, explained, sustainability must be a shared objective to be successful. Although the virtual nature of this year’s CHOW conference meant that attendees were physically distant, the theme of cooperation and partnership still played a starring role.

Authors: Maeve Arthur and Abby Neal