How Can Science Contribute to Policy Development for a Changing Arctic Ocean?
Jake Rice
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Description
Abstract: Effective management must ensure both that the ecosystems are conserved and they provide desired social and economic benefits. Although the language used to discuss “sustainable use” has evolved over the past several decades, the core challenge of finding a balance that society will support and ecosystems can sustain across the ecological, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability has not. Moreover, climate change–related drivers are adding to and interacting with the changes that our uses already impose on ecosystems, and governance processes for sectoral management and for conservation of biodiversity must act in coherent ways for either of them to achieve their objectives. Both of these developments make the challenges of finding the right “balance” for sustainability greater. The pace of change in arctic ecosystems due to climate forcing interacting with new and escalating pressures from uses brings into question the basic notion that any stable “balance” can even exist across the three dimensions of sustainability. The discrepancies among the objectives of separate sectoral management agencies, and between the risk tolerances of governance processes for sectors and processes for conservation of biodiversity, bring into question the existence of any trade-offs that have universal support. Given this unpromising policy and management context, I will try to isolate those things that we can manage, and types of knowledge we need to make wise, effective decisions about those things. This may provide useful insights for both what information we need most, and how we can best use it.
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Item details
- Item number: AK-SG-13-03e
- Year: 2013
- Pages: 21
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.4027/ramecc.2013.05
