Bright spots as climate‐smart marine spatial planning tools for conservation and blue growth
Marine spatial planning that addresses ocean climate-driven change (‘climate-smart MSP’) is a global aspiration to support economic growth, food security and ecosystem sustainability. Ocean climate change (‘CC’) modelling may become a key decision-support tool for MSP, but traditional modelling analysis and communication challenges prevent their broad uptake. We employed MSP-specific ocean climate modelling analyses to inform a real-life MSP process; addressing how nature conservation and fisheries could be adapted to CC. We found that the currently planned distribution of these activities may become unsustainable during the policy's implementation due to CC, leading to a shortfall in its s…
Ecosystem Services: A bridge or a barrier for environmental management?
Across disciplines, the concept of ecosystem services has become an accepted concept through which the complexities of the natural world and its relationships with human society are explained and embedded into global environmental policy. At a time when global ecosystems are continually under pressure due to anthropogenic influences and interactions, it aims to provide policy makers, practitioners and scientists with a common language. In spite of this widespread acceptance, the concept of ecosystem services is in its very nature complicated and full of complex, and sometimes, intangible interactions. As the field of ecosystem service research has grown, the ecosystem services framework has…