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.