Previous Fora / 2013
SIMCOCK, Alan
Joint Coordinator, UN Group of Experts of the Regular Process
After graduating with first-class honours from the University of Oxford, Alan Simcock studied economics and statistics at the Treasury Centre for Administrative Studies. He was Private Secretary to successive United Kingdom Prime Ministers in 1969 – 1972, and then worked in the UK Department of the Environment on railways and shipping, new towns, waste disposal and the regulation of local government. In 1991, he was asked to set up a new division to coordinate UK policy on the marine environment. While heading this division, he was Chairman of the OSPAR Commission for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North East Atlantic. In 1999, he chaired the informal negotiations in the UN Commission on Sustainable Development on the review of the oceans. These resulted in the establishment of the UN Informal Consultative Process on the Oceans and the Law of the Sea, of which he was appointed co-chairperson for its first three years. From 2001 to 2006 he was the Executive Secretary of OSPAR. In both OSPAR roles he participated in organising and delivering the Quality Status Reports 2000 and 2010 on the North-East Atlantic. Since retirement in 2006, he has worked on World Ocean Assessment I, where he is currently Joint Coordinator of the Group of Experts charged with organizing it.
ABSTRACT
17:30-19:00 25 november
PARALLEL THEMATIC SESSIONS II. "Applying Ocean Sciences and Knowledge for Societal Benefit: Demands after Rio+20"
Applying Ocean Sciences and Knowledge for Societal Benefit:
Demands after Rio+20
The Regular Process is an output of Rio+10. Its slow gestation means that its first output, World Ocean Assessment I, due by the end of 2014, will provide a basis for considering the requirements from Rio+20. Rio+20 identified, in The World We Want, around 20 issues on the oceans. These naturally largely focus on policy goals, but their achievement will need to draw on a wide range of natural science and knowledge and take the whole ecosystem – including humans – into account.
World Ocean Assessment I aims at being the first integrated assessment of all the world’s oceans and seas, covering environmental, economic and social aspects. This integration is essential: many of the problems that we face result from lack of an integrated approach. Sectoral policies have been pursued, ignoring their wider implications (examples: fisheries and waste water treatment). Equally, scientific advances have been applied, also ignoring their wider implications – examples include sonar location of fish shoals and anti-fouling paints for ships’ hulls.
The crucial background to everything in the oceans is the dynamic nature of the marine environment. Much more than on land, the environment is in a permanent state of flux. We forget this at our peril. A short presentation can only touch on small parts of this vast dynamic. Five themes where we need better understanding are highlighted, as examples of crucial needs in applying science to deliver the goals of Rio+20:
(a) The physical dynamics of the water column: The thermohaline circulation is fundamental to the way that the planet works. It is a driver of the climate, and can be affected by climate change. We know much about it, but we need to understand better the forces driving its natural variability (examples: the El Niño-Southern Oscillation; the North Atlantic Oscillation) and the results of those changes.
(b) The surface layer and its biodiversity and how they change: The surface layer is where most oceanic primary production occurs and is therefore fundamental to life in the oceans and much of the provisioning ecosystem services we get from them. In parts of the world we know something of this (example: North Atlantic Continuous Plankton Survey) but we need to know more about impacts on the surface layer (example: plastic nanoparticles).
(c) Marine biota population dynamics and statistics: In some parts of the world, we have a reasonable understanding of the population dynamics and states of the main commercial fish stocks (examples: ICES, PICES and CAMLR), but this needs not only to be extended worldwide, but to be made to cover other fish stocks and other biota. Without this, efforts to manage human actions to capture sustainably provisioning ecosystem services will fail. In achieving this, we need to ensure that we use relevant traditional knowledge, and generate confidence in the results among fishing communities (example: North Sea fishing science).
(d) Discharges and emissions to the oceans and their effects: Flows from land to sea are part of the natural order, but anthropogenic impacts on those flows can significantly affect the marine environment. This applies both to hazardous substances and nutrients (examples: mercury; urban waste water; agricultural fertilisers). The ocean dimension of newly developed substances is also crucial (examples – tributyl tin and endocrine disruptors). International cooperation is an effective way to study all this (example – North East Atlantic Co-ordinated Environmental Monitoring Programme).
(e) Making ships cleaner: World trade, and therefore world shipping, will continue to increase enormously. The impacts of shipping will be particularly heavy on pinch-points such as the Straits of Malacca. We need techniques to reduce discharges and emissions from ships (examples: port reception facilities and exhaust emissions) and to enforce the rules (example: satellite and aerial surveillance).
For truly sustainable use of the oceans, we need not only better understanding of the physical sciences of the oceans, but also better understanding of the economic and social dimensions of that use. Work on this is really only just beginning.