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).