A Roadmap to Advance Marine and Coastal Monitoring, Biodiversity Assessment, and International Reporting: A Developing Nation Perspective

Abstract

Despite the increasing number of tools and indicators to measure biodiversity status and trends, many developing countries struggle to initiate and advance coastal and marine assessments needed to monitor and track national and international progress in biodiversity targets. We identified five key challenges that hinder progress in this context, based on a national marine assessment workshop held in South Africa, and developed recommendations and tangible actions to address these challenges drawing from multiple national assessments, regional initiatives, and global collaborations over the last 15 years. Challenges include a poor understanding of methods, limited capacity and funding for assessments, a lack of systematic approaches to biodiversity assessment and indicator development, and scattered efforts that often fail to link science to policy. Key actions could enable the development of a coordinated framework to feed into policy and decision-making at multiple scales. We provide South African examples to highlight a developing country’s progress toward marine biodiversity assessment and provide a roadmap to integrated monitoring, assessment, and reporting based on positive outcomes. Recommendations to address challenges include building collective understanding of assessment tools and methods, prioritizing pressures urgently needing mitigation measures, using relevant indicators to support reporting at multiple scales, applying coordinated approaches to identify gaps and opportunities, codeveloping coordinated approaches with direct policy links, and leveraging resources and technical capacity for iterative improvement. This roadmap can guide developing and developed countries and support global best practices to collaboratively advance marine and coastal ecosystem monitoring and assessment at multiple scales for meeting many objectives.

Scoping an integrated ecosystem assessment for South Africa

“…Such indicators can be used to measure the state or condition of marine ecosystems (Levin et al, 2009;Tallis et al, 2010;Knights et al, 2011) including ecosystem threat assessments using the IUCN methodology, and can help evaluate the effectiveness of management interventions (Levin et al, 2009;. Initial steps have been taken in South Africa to identify key challenges that hinder national marine ecosystem assessment, where recommendations and tangible priority actions have been identified to overcome these challenges (Smit et al, 2022). Work is underway to advance marine ecosystem assessment and to further develop an indicator and assessment framework where ecological indicators will also support upcoming semi-quantitative and later quantitative risk assessments (Keith et al, 2013;Skern-Mauritzen et al, 2018;Smit et al, 2021).…”

Incorporating uncertainty in Indigenous sea Country monitoring with Bayesian statistics: Towards more informed decision-making

“…Despite this history, Indigenous peoples’ inclusion in government-led ocean management has been mostly limited, partly because the conservation and management landscape is biased to western science and governance structures that are foreign to Indigenous cultures (Ross et al 2009 ; Peer et al 2022 ). Practices are often limited to tick-box-type exercises of stakeholder engagement (Strand et al 2022 ), with limited opportunity to genuinely influence or co-design the decision-making process (Smit et al 2022 ). The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples established a universal framework to uphold the rights and interests of Indigenous people including their role in management and governance of land and sea Country.…”

Methodology for prioritizing marine environmental pressures under various management scenarios in the Black Sea

“…In today's rapidly changing world, the marine environment has faced various threats, emphasising the imperative need for developing a systematic approach to prioritising these pressures to ensure the preservation of its ecological balance and long-term health (Halpern et al, 2008;Halpern et al, 2015;Borgwardt et al, 2019;Sundblad et al, 2021;IPCC, 2022;Smit et al, 2022). Understanding how to effectively assess and rank these mechanisms, through which human activities or natural events have altered the marine ecosystem, is paramount for its protection (Ma et al, 2023;Wu et al, 2023;Borja et al, 2016).…”