Introduction
Changing ocean conditions and accelerating human enterprises will mean that benefits and burdens, fairness and justice, are currently distributed and governed differently across socio-ecological systems and will be into the future (Jouffray et al., 2020). Over recent decades, the ocean has seen escalating use and extraction of resources with growth of aquaculture, deep sea mining, shipping, and tourism, and increases in many other stressors, like plastics and pollution. With a projected human population of 8.5 billion by 2030, approximately 40% of which live within 100km of the coast, both the demands and the stressors on oceans are expected to increase, compounding the already substantial challenges of equitable use and sustainable development. Recognising the critical roles of oceans in the future of our society, both locally and globally, the United Nations proclaimed 2021-2030 a Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. The decade aims to improve the trajectory of ocean health and bring diverse stakeholders together behind a common framework to ensure ocean science can fully support countries in creating improved conditions for sustainable development of the ocean. However, inequity is a systemic characteristic of the current ocean economy and so major changes are required over coming decades in order to achieve sustainable development of the ocean in a way that benefits everyone (Österblom et al., 2020).
Equity is a concept rooted in Western law, philosophical and political theory (Hay, 1995). It has been applied for pragmatic purposes as a technical-legal concept in global goal-setting initiatives, such as the Sustainable Development Goals, to measure progress towards equitable outcomes. And yet equity is understood differently in the experience of Traditional and Indigenous Peoples in the autonomous and - in most cases - surrendered governance, culture and knowledge that is endemic to those peoples and not compatible with current Western legal systems (Fischer et al., 2020). Little is published in the Western scientific literature of the pre-colonial concepts of customary equity between humans and the ocean. Present-day survivors of Indigenous nations are centred as critical guides and knowledge keepers to both inform a baseline of collapse of equity in the imperialist process of the past 200-300 years and priorities of redefining the present.
Equity is understood differently again by a range of marginalised groups experiencing intersecting forms of inequity (Kleiber et al., 2017, Lokuge and Hilhorst, 2017, Cohen et al., 2019, Saunders et al., 2020). Acknowledging this pluralism of understandings of equity, we start by first defining equity and highlighting the limits of Western equity theory, before discussing the role of science production in exploring equity under future ocean conditions. We then conduct a synthesis across twelve science-informed future fore-sighting initiatives in ocean and marine studies. Together, these articles consider many of the key challenges facing the world’s oceans, and importantly, leveraged interdisciplinary knowledge from across approximately 120 marine scientists, Indigenous knowledge holders, and environmental managers. Collectively, this suite of papers outlined pathways and associated actions to move towards sustainable futures and achieving the SDGs in the context of climate change (Trebilco et al., 2020), biodiversity conservation (Ward et al., 2020), food security (Farmery et al., 2020), ocean literacy (Kelly et al., In press), plastics and pollution (Puskic et al., 2020), human health (Nash et al., 2020b), coastal and deep sea blue economy (Bax et al., 2020), climate-driven species redistribution (Melbourne-Thomas et al., 2020), ocean governance (Haas et al., 2020), international relations (Smith et al., 2020) and Indigenous rights and access (Fischer et al., 2020). In particular, we are interested in how the futures, and the pathways to achieving those futures as described in those papers, may lead to higher or lower levels of equity.