Visiting Fellow Dr Tundi Agardy speaking on ‘Pathways Towards Ocean Sustainability’, hosted by Provost David Isaac.
To learn more about Worcester’s sustainability projects, visit our website: https://www.worc.ox.ac.uk/news-events/news/introducing-sustainability-season
morning and good afternoon everybody uh welcome to this morning’s or this evening’s uh online academic lecture series from Worcester College here in Oxford many of you will know that this evening’s lecture is part of a wider series of events supporting the college’s new uh initiative of annual interdisciplinary research themes and this year as you will anticipated the theme is sustainability as well as aiming to increase biodiversity on the college estate and to reduce our carbon emissions the college is committed to widening and deepening our research on sustainability and we do that by using our unique College environment to facilitate interdisciplinary research the estate that uh all of you will know and love and our goal is to establish clusters of students and Junior researchers across a variety of disciplines by funding graduate scholarships and early career opportunities so that people can work together and with our focus on this theme to solve our sustainability problems which I know most of you will agree are hugely pressing you will also know that the college runs a distinguished visiting fellow program to invite distinguished academics to college and this term we’re delighted that Dr tundi agardi is working and living in college and meeting students and academic staff to contribute to the important theme of sustainability and our sustainability season for those of you who don’t know uh tundi work she’s an internationally renowned expert in marine conservation she leads sand Seas which she founded which is an independent multidisciplinary group based in Washington DC and through this initiative tundy works at the Nexus of Science and policy to promote environmental problem solving with Partners from around the whole world this includes think tanks foundations development Banks academic institutions environmental groups development Banks and academic institutions as well as uh environmental uh groups on the ground but especially she works with individual Nations struggling to implement sound Marine management Dr guardi was born in the US after her parents and sister fled Hungary in the 1950s she studied at Welsley and Dartmouth colleges in New England and then went on to lead an endangered species Management program in the US Virgin Islands a place where she first became inspired to work in Ocean conservation and that was on a High School uh field trip I understand returning to graduate school at the University of Rhode Island she researched fisheries management and sea turtle population Dynamics and that led to a master of marine Affairs at a PhD in biological sciences toy was part of a nent coastal resources Center which shared American expertise in coastal planning with developing countries and this in addition to her work as a marine policy fellow working with multilateral institutions including UNESCO uh sewed the seeds for interdisciplinary uh work as a senior scientist in the World Wildlife Fund with no formal Marine program when she joined in 1990 tundy worked with Nations across the globe to assist in priority setting and project design and in 1998 she was awarded the Civic scientist of the Year award by the earthwatch foundation in 2005 Dr gardi headed the coastal portion of the first Global evaluation of the status of ecosystems in relation to human well-being and the following year she was awarded the University of Miami’s Rosensteel award for significant achievement in oceanography and marine policy and following those uh distinguished achievements for more than two decades she has led sound Seas finding ways to interface between the scientific Community the international policy Arena Nos and other interested parties to set policy Frameworks for Effective and sustainable marine conservation quite an achievement over many many years and try we’re delighted to have you at Worcester college and it’s an honor to listen to your presentation this evening I’m sure you all will agree this is a wonderful opportunity to hear more about sustainability and the discussions that we curating here at Worcester ton is going to speak for about 40 minutes there will then be an opportunity for questions please put your questions in the Q&A box um on your screens and then I will do my best to uh raise the questions on a fair basis and allow uh tnd the opportunity to answer them so thank you for joining welcome uh tundi and now over to you for your presentation thank you very much thank you very much David and thank you for the opportunity to come as a visiting fellow uh to Wester College it’s been fantastic I am just reveling in the um in the great work that is being done across disciplines here and the fact that you’ve developed a sustainability strategy and um I’m really enjoying the work that I’m doing with Dr Lisa wedding who um is working in um the department of geography uh running the seascapes lab so thank you for the opportunity I’m going to share my screen uh I can do that and I’m assuming that you can see that I hope you can I think I’ll get a message if I can’t if you can’t see it uh my ambition today is to talk about ocean sustainability and to talk about the pathway that we’re currently on H and the pathways that we need to be on um in the future so as many of my colleagues that travel the world and work to solve problems um across the globe there’s good news and there’s bad news um I won’t uh spend too much time on the bad news but I do want to begin with the bad news to kind of set the stage uh we’re currently in a situation where we have a kind of negative feedback loop uh with Coastal and Marine degradation going on that habitat loss is driving uh the loss of resources and values that people depend on that’s creating more and more conflict and in turn that’s leading to more and more degradation of nature um and loss of um the values that and benefits that nature provides it’s a a bit ironic because as our knowledge about ocean values grows uh those values are being lost and we have amassed an enormous body of knowledge both experiential knowledge uh uh scientific knowledge user knowledge indigenous knowledge we now are quite wise about what’s going on with the ocean uh and we’re also very aware of our impact on oceans uh and the values that they provide us but unfortunately we seem to be stuck in this destructive kind of feedback loop uh an endless cycle on a path that we need to be getting off of uh this knowledge about values um runs the gamut from everything from understanding carbon sequestration of the oceans so the role of the oceans um in mitigating climate change um and also in promoting adaptation to climate change that’s been a focus for many many researchers um especially in the last decade but also we’ve understood that certain portions of the coasts and ocean uh deliver certain kinds of values that are extremely important to certain groups of people uh and we’ve been able to quantify those values we’ve been able to study Trends in in those values and uh in the benefits that flow in fact the Millennium assessment um that David mentioned was the first to look at uh Global ecosystems across the board everything from Urban ecosystems to Ocean ecosystems and what the findings of that uh assessment showed was that the coastal areas really have an enormous Myriad of ecosystem services or benefits that nature provides uh different um different beneficiaries benefit from those values or ecosystem services but uh it is one of the most rich um biomes in the world in terms of delivery of values um important to humans uh these ecosystem Services have been Quantified many times and uh there’s a lot of debate about the the absolute number but certainly in the tens of trillions of dollars um of value provided to human beings but I think more importantly rather than just focusing on the monetary value of the benefits that nature provides to think about a healthy ocean as being the foundation for life on Earth and without a healthy ocean life cannot persist on the planet so it is that important much more important than the individual values um that certain beneficiaries derive from the ocean we utilize the ocean in many many ways and that utilization causes both direct pressures and also uh indirect impacts um the indirect impacts can come from far away from the ocean and unfortunately the oceans are um the ultimate snc for a lot of the pollutants um that we’ve created in the world uh and they uh are affected again not only by what we do in in the sea and on the coast but also what we do in river systems and in land areas sometimes very far from the coast against the backdrop of all these cumulative multiple pressures we we have climate change and along with climate change comes uh ocean warming which is really stressing a lot of um ecosystems and their ability to deliver Services we have ocean acidification which is a special category of climate change impact uh very troubling one one that we’re only now uh coming to understand and only now appreciating the the ramifications of um increasing acidification on marine life and then ultimately on human life uh we have also of course sea level rise and the loss of coastal habitats um increased storm events and um along with that an inundation of a lot of areas which then causes a lot of pollution of coastal areas as waterers reced and so forth so we have a lot of problems to solve the current condition is one in which uh we’ve had loss of habitat I won’t Regal you with the figures it’s quite depressing but for certain ecosystems like coral reefs we’ve lost a very high percentage of coral reefs and there is reason to believe that coral reefs will disappear unless we change our trajectory we also have a lot of pollution problems and these seem to be kind of under the radar uh we have a lot of toxins um coming into the ocean environment as I said the ocean is a snc for all of what we do uh in land and fresh water uh and in the sea and a specific problem with pollution in the marine environment which is getting attention but probably not as much attention as it should get is ufic or um the over fertilization of coastal Waters which is leading to um declines in productivity and sometimes um dead zones that spread across very wide areas um and cause the complete loss of um ecosystem services and benefits to Mankind we also have a problem that we’re squeezing people who are dependent on oceans into smaller and smaller spaces with fewer and fewer resources and that of course causes a lot of conflict now you might think uh the O the world is a very big place and the global ocean is a very very vast system and that is true but unfortunately the coastal areas are not so vast they’re a very thin band of um transitional um ecosystem between the land and the Sea uh and across fresh water and and the coastal systems are actually not only the systems that are under the most pressure from humankind but also the systems that are kind of containing what I would call the vital organs of the ocean system itself so these are the most ecologically important areas the transition areas between Land and Sea mediated by freshwater so things like estuaries um shorelines themselves um Mangrove forests seagrass beds um Delta areas and so forth these are the areas that are keeping the ocean system alive and healthy and running well and these are paradoxically the areas that we are most impacting by both direct and indirect use now the values in coastal ecosystems really explain a lot of historical human settlement um we we have in coastal systems these pull factors these reasons that people choose to settle in coastal areas particularly around um estuaries so uh we have a current situation we about a little over a third of the global population lives in the coastal area it does vary about how you define coastal zone so that you’ll see figures like 1/ half 1/3 but in any case a significant amount of the human population lives on the coast and about 2third of that Coastal population lives close to a major Estuary within 50 kilometers and the reason for that is that major estuaries uh provide a lot of services they provide um access to the Sea for transport uh they provide Waste Management they provide uh water um balancing or hydrological balance they provide a lot of resources that humans rely on both food and material uh and for this reason people have chosen to settle on the coast near these estuaries which again are the vital organs of the system so we have a situation which is uh difficult but it is a wicked problem that we know how to solve and that’s the good news we know what the pathways are that Le lead to Ocean sustainability we do know that we do have the tools and the technology to go down these Pathways we have also a collective understanding that things need to change so I think this point can’t be emphasized enough I think 20 or 30 years ago um in the dawn of the environmentalism era there was very little attention to oceans and there was a sense that oceans were too big to fail that there W was nothing that humans could do that would ever alter uh ocean ecology or um impact ocean productivity and the delivery of these um ecosystem services but we now know better and we now have publics around the world who are understanding that oceans are declining in health and that we need to do something about it that that’s imperative not only for marine life but also for human life and I think the really really good news and the reason that I um tend to be an optimist even though I traffic in uh data about declines is that I think we are in an extremely opportune time right now probably the most opportune time to affect change and even though the clock is ticking and the change is ur urgently needed we have the ability to seize these opportunities right now so let me explain why I think there is hope um for trying to find these Pathways and why I feel the enabling conditions just happen to be right at this current point in time there are a number of international treaties that have come into being in the past two years um really exciting time for seeing the world Converge on this um need to conserve biodiversity um to restore the ecosystems that we’ve degraded um and to bring new focus on Marine areas um so I’ll run down this list quickly and then uh describe a little bit um these agreements in more detail so we have the convention on biological diversity uh and an agreement that was um signed or agreed I should say in late 2022 uh which committed the many member states to a global biodiversity framework uh to achieve actually a number of uh targets and I’ll describe those in a little bit uh in addition there was a very exciting agreement uh in the United Nations uh recently which is concerning the high seas or the areas Beyond national jurisdiction uh and this was a landmark agreement years in the making uh and has a lot of uh promise for trying to manage our impacts on the high seas uh we have had recently in the um European Union a restoration law that went into effect uh which is a binding law and which I’ll describe in a little bit too which has implications for not just land but also sea uh we have a couple of we’re in the middle of actually a couple of un decades uh the un uh decade for ocean science and the UN decade of restoration uh we’ve had some very interesting negotiations in the World Trade Organization around uh perverse subsidies and how to um get rid of some of those and then in addition there have been high-profile reports that have been picked up by the media uh and have been really not just galvanizing attention and focusing on kind of priorities but also providing guidance um and how to address some of these high-profile issues so I’ll go into these in a little bit more detail now so the convention on biological diversity uh as I said it was agreed in late December of 2022 uh coming out with a global biodiversity framework uh for the member states uh which are virtually all the the countries in the world uh the gpf the global biodiversity framework has 23 targets uh they’re very very ambitious targets and uh they are much more um complex and detailed than earlier decadal targets that the CBD has agreed so um the last targets that were stipulated or agreed were in 2020 they were called the aichi targets and in the aichi targets the countries agreed to protect the biodiversity in 20% of land and sea area by the year 2020 now that Target was missed um it was not achieved um and the new Targets in the global biodiversity framework are actually even more ambitious uh the targets surrounding the coverage of protected areas to conserve biodiversity for instance is 30% of land and sea area to be protected by 2030 now it might strike you as odd as to say that uh we didn’t achieve the Target in 2020 therefore we’re going to up the Target in 2030 but in fact the 2030 targets are much more um specific in what needs to be done uh and provide much more guidance on how these targets can be achieved um so I think a great improvement over the 2020 targets and the 2010 targets that preceded those so I won’t go into too much detail uh for the purposes of ocean restoration um and these Pathways to sustainability it’s really Target Two um which stipulates that 30% of land and sea area should be under restoration by the year 2030 and then Target three which is This Global coverage of protected areas uh which aims for 30% land and 30% sea uh to be protected by 2030 lots of other targets to uh concerning sustainable use and many of these play into the ability to protect and restore uh the high seas agreement or the BB andj agreement it’s called bbnj because it’s referred to as the biodiversity Beyond national jurisdiction agreement um and this is a new agreement under the existing unclo or un law the sea agreement uh a binding treaty um which again involves most countries of the world uh the United States is not among them but uh most other Maritime Nations uh do have ratified the law the sea convention so the bb& J agreement is very very significant and the reason is that the high seas the areas Beyond each country’s jurisdiction actually cover um a very large part of the earth about 40% of the Earth surface everything that you see in this map in blue is high seas or a andj areas Beyond national jurisdiction so a huge part of the planetary system is basically uh a wild west a place that is not being controlled by Any Nation or group of Nations um and that kind of lack of control and lack of um stewardship for nature in these places um has led to this new Landmark agreement uh the bbnj agreement sets out some very specific things and um does so in a very strategic way so one is this uh requirement to establish large-scale Marine protected areas in the high seas and this of course um touches back on the CBD agreement and helps fulfill that Target of 30% by 2030 uh but in addition to that so it’s not just about uh setting up Marine protected areas um and it’s not just about uh the negotiations that would go into that you can imagine uh the global Community trying to come up with priorities on where to site these protected areas um and uh what kind of regulations should take place in them it goes beyond just protected areas so it talks speaks a lot to the sharing of benefits um that come from um exploiting Marine Resources on the high seas um and stipulates that there must be very strong um uh assessments done environmental impact assessments done whenever um any extractive industry um is going to take place uh in a PL in on the high seas uh and this is a reaction to um uh voluntary or soft um treaties uh non-binding trees or voluntary things like the FAO conduct on Fisheries um which um don’t have this kind of clear uh regulatory um oversight to make sure that we can anticipate impacts before the activities take place um and that can weigh into the trade-offs and and choices made by the International Community about whether or not to allow certain activities to take place um the bb& J agreement also focuses very much on capacity building recognizing that the high seas are only accessible to those Nations that have um a strong uh research or industrial uh Fleet essentially and um can access these distant Waters um and also that a lot of the information about the resources uh and uh their potential value it um is currently held in um the developed world and so there’s um stip ations on transfer of data um and um technological transfer as well um so that there’ll be more Equitable sharing of benefits on the high seas which are after all a global common uh the EU restoration law I won’t go into that too much but it really Bears mentioning because it is legally binding on every country within the European Union uh to establish uh restoration programs uh which require then to understand why why these areas that are degraded uh became degraded um and take steps towards both active um and passive restoration to help them recover so this is of course Very pertinent to all of the EU countries which are scrambling to develop these uh restoration programs and put them in place um as as the EU restoration law Target l uh but it’s also going to be really important for a lot of the rest of the world who will be watching to the EU countries to see how they actually instituted restoration uh and um to see what what led to successes and what might have tripped up um restoration projects um and from which we can learn um I the UN decades um I only mentioned these you know every decade is a un decade of something or several things actually um just so happens that uh we happen to be in a un a set of un decades that’s really pertinent for ocean restoration and one again is this um un decade of ocean science uh which has very strong commitments to share ocean science very widely to collect data and make it available um to the global Community um but also again to to transfer technology um and to build therefore build the capacity um of countries that are um underdeveloped in the in the Marine Science domain um but importantly also and especially for the purposes of planning for restoration the UN ocean decade also uh commits to mapping Marine biodiversity uh very widely across the ocean Basin and that’s going to be very important as decisions are made of about access and allocation of resources um both on the high seas and of course within the jurisdiction of countries um the other reason that I mentioned these two decades is because even though they’re kind of aspirational and um they aren’t they don’t carry the same theft as a binding International treaty uh they are really important for a number of reasons one is that they focus the attention on priorities that are collectively decided by the global Community uh and the priorities for oceans and seas um include among them this reducing pollution as a top priority something that a lot of the other treaties don’t dare touch um very difficult to reduce pollution because pollution of the ocean comes from Far Upland uh from our freshwater systems uh from groundwater sometimes um not just also from what we do at Sea so uh reducing pollution is a a big ambition of the ocean decades and the sharing of information of experience and of Technology uh will help us achieve that goal um all related to that is uh a commitment in the um decade of restoration um and actually supported by the UN decade on ocean science is to reduce hypoxia or low oxygen levels you may have heard of dead zones in the ocean these are areas that um become robbed of oxygen uh which causes a die off of um certain organisms um and can often lead to uh a complete what we call a dead zone an area with little life in it uh and these uh hypoxic and anoxic areas around the world are growing uh some of them are quite large uh for instance in the Gulf of Mexico um in North America or in um the Black Sea these areas are growing both um in their breadth and also in um in their depth layer so they’re getting deeper and deeper or um more and more volume covered by these low oxygen areas so hugely important issue and one that the International Community is now committed to resolving um and of course the UN decade ocean decade um also focuses on sustainable Harvest and sustainable use and what can be done on the coast to protect uh land uh and infrastructure from flooding and um storm impacts I mentioned the high-profile reports and I won’t go into these in any detail um just to say um if you these are just ones that come to mind um kind of spontaneously there are many many important reports that have come out including the ipcc the intergovernmental panel on climate change which published a report on oceans and cryosphere um and the work of the uh International Panel on um uh biodiversity and ecosystem Services these reports are huge synthetic um amalgamation of our knowledge um and our science around uh climate change around oceans around nature and ecosystem services and um many of these reports have attracted the attention of U mass media and for that reason uh it’s attracted the attention of the global CI cry um who then in turn put pressure on politicians to um address these problems um in a way now one thing you might notice from this list of high-profile reports that as I say are very um ad hoc just came sprung to mind to for me uh is that all of these touch on the economic value of the ocean um both in terms of resources and in terms of um ecosystems services and and cultural values um it is really this um sophistication that we now have in valuation that’s attracted a lot of attention to these issues that wasn’t there before um and it it does appear that this also is attracting the attention of policy makers and decision makers um who uh do pay attention when there’s talk of uh resources that are wasted or um economic opportunities that occur uh when we restore these systems just a quick note on the World Trade Organization harmful subsidies negotiations so um this has been in play for a long time environmental groups have been putting pressure on the World Trade Organization to tackle this subject um both in terms of agricultural subsidies but also in terms of um fishery subsidies and particularly um subsidies of providing fuel to Industrial um fishing operations uh there’s been a lot of pressure because um there isn’t much traction that environmental groups can put on individ individual Industries um or individual countries um to do this so there is a sense that um by taking this up in the World Trade Organization it elevates the the issue uh and could lead to uh International agreement and in fact it did lead to an international agreement so in 20122 a very uh good year for international agreements uh there was an agreement in the World Trade Organization to phase out harmful fuel subsidies um I think this is a great first step um it’s not actually operational yet because two-thirds of the member states have to um accepted or deposit instruments of acceptance and we’re only about halfway there right now um but there is more work to be done at the WTO and as we speak the WTO is negotiating um how to take these um steps to control homefall subsidies even further um and to especially on the fishery side to really look at cap capacity enhancing subsidies so um sub subsidies which allow over capitalization of fishing fleets uh which then drives overe exploitation which is very difficult to control and stop so uh keep an eye on this space because this uh negotiation is playing out right now and we’ll see uh what comes of it and we’ll see if 2024 is also a good year for international agreements so of course these are all good aspirations but you might ask how can we actually make these aspirations into a reality and I would say to that that um aspirations are all fine and good but we need to move in the direction that we aspire to to and at each step that we take we make a choice and the world community and political leaders have the decision to stay on the track that we’re on which is largely leading to overe exploitation and degradation or they have the choice to change track to find a new path to think about um what would benefit the greatest amount of people and what would satisfy human well-being while at the same time of course allowing nature to restore itself because the health of nature including the ocean is fundamental to our human wellbeing so there are other paths that we’re on and I’m just going to mention a few that I think are concrete tangible Pathways to get us to Ocean restoration and to sustainability so the first one is just taking stock of what we already know uh and using that information to scope out the problems that are in front of us to be able to craft Solutions so um while there is an enormous investment in um academic institutions like Oxford and others to build up the body of knowledge we have to apply this knowledge in first of all in understanding these problems very specifically and then crafting solutions to address these specific problems so why do I think and you may think well that’s obvious but in fact um in the Marine domain especially at least this is what I’m familiar with I don’t know if the same exists in the in the terrestrial sphere but in the Marine domain what we have often is a situation where people who are making decisions planners or managers uh resource managers often reach for a solution before they even understand what the problem is uh and the problem scoping step seems to be a step that um people like to jump over and or give a small amount of time and energy too so I think now we have so much knowledge we have so much experience we have this knowledge integrated now and we have it shared across countries and across regions so I think we’re now able we’re at the point where we’re now able to use our our information our experience our knowledge to be able to scope these problem as well each case will be different each site will be different each ocean Basin or sea is different um but we do have the knowledge about most places to understand what the problem is and to be able to craft a solution and I also want to say here that uh we shouldn’t think that this is scientific information that we derive um in kind of traditionalist ways um in traditional conventional science ways uh but it’s also information very importantly social science information so not just natural science but also user knowledge and traditional knowledge so what people know and understand about the places where they work and live um and bringing that local knowledge or user knowledge or traditional knowledge into the greater mix of of knowledge is really um a good way to be able to scope these problems and craft Solutions um now I love donkeys but I do want to uh put out a a warning for um asses and by asses um this is um alternative stable States uh it’s something that has cropped up um in many Marine systems alternative St stable states are something that we desperately need to avoid um they’re very difficult to fix once a critical threshold has been passed um and an example of this is um the simplest example that I know is coral reef systems corals are um gener corals are animals they live uh in colonial um assemblages um on and they make Reef structures so coral reef is um a community of organisms including Coral animals and plants and uh sponges and a whole variety of biota um and a healthy coral reef is coral dominated dominated by the coral um that makes the reef uh but in uh cases where corals are stressed by pollution particularly uh water quality issues too many nutrients getting into the water and so forth uh combined with cor with climate change impacts um and can be combined with uh over fishing of certain important species on the reef um these coral reefs can shift from Coral dominated to alal dominated algae Grows All Over the The Reef surface um basically smothering out the life of everything except the algae um that’s an alternative stable State very difficult to revert back to the coral reef uh so this is something we need to look out for not just identifying problems and fixing the problems but monitoring the systems Health um in every system that we have where we know we have these uh tipping points where we know we have these thresholds um if we see that we’re moving towards those danger zones uh those tipping points uh we need to invest maximum amount of energy and attention to fixing the problems before we get to that alternative uh stable state so a second Pathway to sustainability uh which I think is possible now is um to think and plan holistically and by that I mean when we’re trying to restore ocean Health we have to think about What’s led to the degradation that problem scoping I just spoke about um generally this will mean that we aren’t just focused on what’s happening in the water uh but also focused on what’s happening on land um what may be happening in the Watershed um what what rivers are bringing to the Sea and so forth um so when we think and plan holistically it requires us to think big it requires us to um think in kind of system science to understand these complex linkages um and to integrate our solution across all of these interconnected biomes um including the humans that live um in these interconnected biomes of course because it’s going to be human behavior that we need to change in order to restore some of these ecosystems so why is this possible now well we have three decades of very good Coastal management integrated Coastal management so dealing with a lot of different uses and sectors um in the coastal strip um we have now about a decade or more of marine spatial planning that’s been focused on the the offshore areas more from the coast going out to sea uh and to date we haven’t seen really a linkage of these these two Realms very much nor have we seen Marine spatial planning really focus on um being harmonious with or influencing watershed management and land use in the coastal zone so we’ve had all these kind of moving parts progress towards uh making the coasts better healthier uh making the offshore areas healthier um making river systems healthier but now we need to integrate all of these things together and think about how um we might be addressing these issues in a holistic manner it requires that we really fully consider land freshwater um and the sea and of course the atmosphere because um many many um in many areas the the atmospheric deposition of pollutants is what’s driving water quality losses so uh it’s absolutely imperative that we think about all these interconnections and that we deal with them in an integrated and holistic way another third Pathway to sustainability is to is to introdu produce more long-termism to really think about the long-term impact um of what we’re doing and the long-term uh viability of any restoration that we attempt um so and to be thinking in this kind of long-term way requires that we think about how not just this kind of static health of a of a system like the ocean health but also to think about resilience so to think about future disturbance um future cumulative threats that affect the ocean and think about ways to maximize um the resilience of these systems so they can withstand these additional future pressures um this kind of long-term thinking uh which not only is a you know is a function of kind of sophisticated system science and um ability to uh predict um Trends in condition uh but also is is in the domain of scenario science so really telling stories of alternative plausible futures um to be able to think about the consequences of our action over the long term super important to do because it equips decision makers with an array of options um from which they can understand trade-offs and choices it’s also super important because it prevents us from being surprised by the unintended consequences of certain actions um now we can’t anticipate everything that’s going to happen and there’s always going to be some surprises but if we invest more of our um knowledge and understanding towards thinking through the consequences of every action that we take um will be less apt to be surprised um and perhaps in the in the question and answer I can talk about some of these examples of um unintended consequences that really um surprised people and and led to not the outcomes that they expected so uh having this long-term view in mind is super important and we have the tools and approaches to be able to do that um and we need to use them to the maximum extent we can we in restor Ocean restoration now have a lot of experience too so we not only have all these tools online and methods and approaches um and conceptual Frameworks and uh all of the theory behind that um also supplied with uh traditional knowledge and user knowledge um which kind of just enhances our ability to use these tools effectively um we not only have all of this at our disposal disposal but we have case studies so we can learn from where the any one tool might work most effectively uh what we can learn from the pitfalls um that that projects face uh in the roll out of restoration um and whether that’s building rebuilding uh salt Mars as in the upper left picture here in the solent in the UK or whether it’s um rebuilding uh oyster reef and the middle picture top picture in Pensacola Bay in Florida or whether that’s um establishing new seagrass in Abu Dhabi as the upper right picture um cleaning up and restoring uh and physically rebuilding U monk seal habitat uh in the Mediterranean in the lower left um doing uh macro algae aquaculture so seagrass seaweed aquaculture sorry in Peru um to improve the water quality of a bay um and enhance the biodiversity that way or probably something you’ve heard a lot about is um Coral ref restoration and um the the initiatives that are going on all around the world to grow out Corals in Nursery areas um then uh improve the the water quality condition on the reef and then transplant these um Nursery corals back out onto the reef uh when the conditions are better so we have a lot of tools methods these are only a few uh but as I say we have now the Practical experience of where the rubber hits the road and trying to do these restoration Pro projects um and seeing what works and what doesn’t and what the conditions for Success are um and for this reason we can now not only replicate uh these successes uh but we can also come to scale with a lot of restoration that started out very small um and is now moving towards large scale ocean restoration the finally the last pathway I want to talk about um in my little Pathways to Ocean sustainability uh is to find ways to really harness um the incredible awareness that’s been growing and um what seems to be a kind of spirit of communalism or at least cooperation um and something of a new ethos and I think uh you know that Spirit of um communalism is not prevalent in every society and every every society in every demographic but it’s certainly is prevalent uh among the young people of much of the world um and we have to find ways to strengthen that wave of awareness and and ride it to a sustainable future um and that means not only getting engaged with um putting pressure on politicians to to restore nature and to to pay attention to Ocean health and so forth uh but it also means um personal individual behavior um and doing whatever one can to to live sustainably on the earth um maybe reducing consumption um maybe um maybe thinking about uh different ways to um vacation or to experience nature or um maybe even to communicate through the Arts and um so forth to communicate the the importance of Nature and ocean um ocean as a part of nature um but also very importantly um strategies to achieve sustainability like Worcester College’s um sustainability strategy I just want to do a shout out to Dr Lisa wedding um who invited me here uh for this fellowship and with whom I’m working um to address issues of large scale ocean restoration uh but Lisa is in charge of um sustainability for the college and um this sustainability strategy um has very concrete steps on how Worcester and the community of Worcester um can move towards a more sustainable future so I think all of this is possible all of this is being done and we just need to ramp it up and keep the energy going um it’s going to be possible now I think to break this destru cycle that we’ve had to date this negative feedback loop and turn it on its head and turn it into a positive uh for both the ocean and for Humanity so I thank you all for listening um and I thank you for being aware of the momentum that’s building and for being a part of it and I also would like to thank David and Lisa um and Wester College for um inviting me here and allowing me to share my thought thoughts so thank you very much