3.1 Business as usual – Managing complexity
The Business as Usual (BAU) scenario is based on the current status quo predicting that global oceans governance will continue to face highly interconnected and multifaceted problems. The three major risks of the impacts of the overexploitation of marine resources, inequitable distribution of access to and benefits from marine ecosystem services, and inadequate or inappropriate adaptation to changing ocean conditions are partially addressed by some actors, but efforts to address issues related to ocean conservation will not start soon enough and will not be sufficient to place ocean use and exploitation on a sustainable footing (Duarte et al. 2020). Human pressure on marine ecosystems will increase to meet the growing demand for goods and services (Halpern et al. 2020; FAO 2020), and exploitation of marine resources will receive the most attention from government institutions (Sumaila et al. 2019). The distribution of benefits and/or costs will continue to be recognised as an important topic of discussion in national and international fora. However, it will be difficult for actors with different economic interests (e.g. developed and developing states) to agree on solutions that address inequities (Shelton 2008). Adapting to changing ocean conditions will be difficult, due to lags between impacts and policy responses (Blasiak 2020, Slawinski et al. 2017). Knowledge gaps about the oceans such as in species distribution (Menegotto and Rangel, 2018) will persist and these knowledge gaps will undermine prospects for evidence- and knowledge-based decision making (Columbus 2016).
Positive developments will include the widespread adoption of some key international oceans agreements, such as the United Nations Fish Stock Agreement (UNFSA), which is ratified by most countries that harvest straddling and highly migratory fish stocks (United Nations Treaty Collection 2020). The MARPOL Convention - the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships – will further reduce vessel-based marine pollution. The draft convention for the conservation and sustainable use of Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) will enter into force but will lack broad implementation and enforcement capacity as states struggled to reach an agreement (de Santo et al. 2020, Cremers et al. 2020). However, the implementation of the BBNJ agreement will likely be accompanied by an increase in establishing high seas marine protected areas. Besides marine protected areas there will be a growing use of marine spatial planning as a management strategy, which will result in a more coherent ocean management strategies, even though conceptual and practical challenges will remain (Santos et al. 2019).
Formal rules, policies and institutions for oceans management at the national level will continue to be developed or modified iteratively. However, these rules will remain poorly integrated across sectors, resulting in gaps and missed opportunities in addressing the three key risks (Vince 2015). Implementation, compliance, and enforcement will remain patchy, due to lack of resources (Vince et al. 2017) and political will (Nilsson et al. 2019). Governance actors’ main priority will be economic growth, promoting, for example, harmful subsidies, which further contributes to overfishing (Sumaila et al 2019). Moreover, the direction of funding towards economy-oriented aspirations may lead to funding cuts for basic research and capacity development or may influence research topics and direction.
Key governance decisions will not make the best use of existing scientific, indigenous, and traditional knowledge (Pentz and Klenk 2017, Weiss et al 2012). With the need for increased evidence-based decision making, new challenges related to data sharing, protection and management will emerge (e.g. Intellectual Property), leaving important information hidden, unavailable or overlooked. Investments in government infrastructure and capacity will remain low, especially in developing nations and small island states, resulting in reliance on outdated research technologies. Despite growing efforts, gaps in knowledge and governance capacity between developed and developing countries will continue, limiting our adaptive and collective responses to ocean governance challenges (Chiarolla 2016).
In a BAU scenario, few parties will acknowledge the need for change, and climate change induced impacts such as redistribution of important species will lead to increased conflicts (Mendenhall et al. 2020). Legitimacy and trust will remain essential for co-governance across scales, but their development will continue to be difficult (Turner et al 2017). Thus, while system-wide legitimacy in some parts of ocean governance may slowly increase at globally significant decision-making meetings, less influential stakeholders will still struggle to speak up and be heard. For example, indigenous and traditional stakeholders will increasingly participate in global meetings as a result of international pressure for improved legitimacy and transparency, but their influence on the meetings’ outcomes will remain limited (Weiss et al 2013). As a result, the ocean will continue to be governed by a small elite (whose composition varies depending on fluctuating alliances), with members having trade powers and rights of exploitation but different perceptions and understandings of environmental risks and fairness.
Media will play an important role in influencing ocean users and coastal communities (McCombst 2002; Soroka 2003) and will not always make use of the latest scientific evidence (Boykoff 2008). In addition, there will remain a lack of investment in capacity and key infrastructure for communities that are exposed to sea-level rise, oil and gas pollution and other ecological impacts resulting in poor adaptive capacity and high transaction costs for sustainable resource use and collective actions. While some companies will be role models in sustainable resource use, most will participate in “blue-washing” activities (Voyer et al. 2018). For example, deep-seabed mining companies are promoting themselves as sustainable, less invasive and vital to a low-carbon and green-tech based future, despite the potential for vast ecological damage of the industry to seabed ecosystems (Cuvelier et al. 2018; Levin et al. 2016).
3.2 Sustainable 2030 –Embracing complexity
Following the approach described in section 2 and by Nash et al. 2020, we explored different future scenarios. Scenario parameters were set by the project teams – see Nash et al. 2020. The scenario drivers and narratives for this paper were developed iteratively through several workshops and discussions by team members identify drivers, constraints and opportunities for the two scenarios elaborated here. Our vision of a More Sustainable Future embraces the complexity of ocean governance and moves towards reducing the three major risks. Unlike non-place management, place management takes into account the distinctive features of an individual place and customize management measures and regulations specific to that place (Young et al. 2007). Adoption and implementation of place-based management and precautionary approaches, together with increased public awareness of ocean overexploitation, will lead to improvements in managing resource use and impacts. A realisation of the need to address social inequity will lead to transformations in cooperation on ocean issues and capacity to adapt to changes in the ocean (Coscieme et al. 2020; Díaz et al. 2019).
In a sustainable 2030 future scenario, new operational rules that complement or reform existing laws will be developed and implemented. Together, these rules will build a more holistic and strategic framework. They will be informed by ambitious objectives shared across players and will be better equipped to address the challenge of fragmented ocean governance. The BBNJ agreement will provide a starting point to address increased pressures from deep-sea resource use. Even though the BBNJ agreement was established on the principle of “not undermining” existing organizations and initiatives, the outcome of the BBNJ negotiations rather strengthens than undermine existing organization (Gjerde et al. 2019). The increasing availability of resources and management capacity will improve compliance and enforcement. Institutional coordination and cooperation between national, sub-national, and local communities will improve sustainable practices and will lead to coordinated efforts to close managerial and regulatory loopholes.
A broader range of organisations and actors will contribute to decisions. Decision-making will be guided by the best available scientific, indigenous, and traditional knowledge. The use of technology will improve monitoring, control and surveillance, and will support more equitable use of ocean resources. Better use of indigenous and traditional knowledge in planning and decision making will improve the legitimacy of ocean governance. Increased transparency will improve the availability of data, will allow scrutiny of decisions and actions, will reduce information asymmetry among actors, and will improve trust amongst important communities and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) stakeholders. This will lay the foundation for ongoing negotiations to continue improving and adapting ocean governance over time.
Focused research will advance our understanding of ocean processes. Research will be supported by local communities organised as citizen scientists. Policymakers will use improved research and crowd-sourced data in their strategic planning, emergency preparedness, and adaptive management. Through technological advances, local communities will be empowered to participate in monitoring coastal environments against illegal, unreported and unregulated activities, pollution, and sea-level rise. As more local communities and civil society will be engaged in policy and decision-making, their commitment to better oceans management will be strengthened. This will lay the foundations for consensus or acceptable compromises regarding global ocean management goals which will, in time, lead to international commitments.
Pathway to achieve sustainable 2030
Through the lens of agency, we identified 40 actions across the five drivers to address the three risks highlighted by the Sustainable Development Goals and thus likely leading towards our vision of the sustainable future (Figure 1). We grouped these actions and provide a brief description in the next section (see Appendix 1 for a full list of actions). A clear challenge in moving from a business as usual trajectory is the complex interactions among actors in shaping institutional action or non-action. Enhancing agency of actors such as first nations peoples, whose interests are under-, or non-represented, through engagement and capacity building is a key here.