Providing a strong legal basis for protecting marine resources
Legal frameworks for ocean governance need to adapt to better address emerging governance challenges. This can be achieved by providing incentives for industry to engage with more environmentally friendly practices or by increasing taxes on environmentally harmful behaviour (Action 7). Major issues identified in the Business as Usual scenario were the inconsistency among existing regulations and the lack of coordination when implementing new rules. For more sustainable ocean governance, it is important that legislative and regulatory frameworks are developed in a consistent way and are informed by international and regional legal obligations (Action 9). Cooperation between international (e.g. United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea - UNCLOS) and regional agreements need to be fostered through the use of mechanisms such as Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) (Action 10). Generally, it is important to incentivize cooperation regarding developing solutions for marine governance issues. Global institutional arrangements need to be established so that participants can directly act through them and support the ambitions of disparate regional and sectoral bodies (Laffoley et al. 2019) (Action 14). Moreover, governance rules need to be clearer and more defined in order to prevent elites from influencing actions (Action 21). In the area of fisheries management, the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organization provides a good example of a more progressive decision-making approach (Schiffman 2013). Increased cooperation is imperative to deal with complexity in ocean governance. To realize this, adequate funding mechanisms for full participation in Conferences of the Parties (CoPs) to global agreements are needed (Laffoley et al. 2019) (Action 12, 16).