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ASC 2002

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Centenary Day

Open Lecture and Invited Talks

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Abstracts for open lecture and invited lectures

Open Lecture

Ocean Resources Management: Why and How

Professor Gunnar Kullenberg
Former Chair of the ICES ACMP and the Consultative Committee

The presentation gives an overview of the role of the ocean and its resources in the new global service-oriented economy and the globalisation. This is intended to present a case for the need for adequate ocean governance. Such must include an ocean observing system able to provide required data inputs for models. The models must also be an integral part of the ocean governance system. These models should be able to analyse various management and development scenarios at regional and sub-regional scales, feeding also into management models at local level. The models need to include the circulation and the ecosystem dynamics. The basis for development of such model tools is available and public models are being made. Society must ensure that adequate factual information about the conditions and observation data are regularly provided. The case for this has been made in context of the climate change analysis.

The economy today is a service economy, relying on services, distributions, and global connections and communications.

We operate now in a truly global situation. In the words of the Secretary-General of the United Nations: "Globalisation has been made possible by the progressive dismantling of barriers to trade and capital mobility, fundamental technological advances, steadily declining costs of transport, communication and computing". This has fostered an inter-dependency and inter-relationship between peoples and regions at the global scale not experienced before. We are now really all in the same ship. The situation provides for many potential benefits and opportunities, but also enhances the vulnerability. Decisions have to be made in conditions of uncertainty.

The global change has impacts everywhere. The most significant global change over the past 50 years is the rise of the human population from 2 to 6 billion people. The climate change is another issue of great concern, coupled to the first one. Both these global changes are irreversible - at least over the 100 to 1000 years timescale.

The ocean provides a multitude of services for our society and the economy. Perhaps the most important ones are: maritime transport; food production; the ocean role in the climate system; ocean and coasts for recreation and tourism; waste recipient services; other financial and product services, e.g. oil and gas; and poverty eradication. The presentation will briefly review all of these areas, with respect to the current situation and expected future development.

All sectors of society are influenced by the ocean and coastal services. In the case of the coast it has been realized that an integrated management approach is needed. However, this is the need also for the ocean as a whole. An accepted global ocean governance mechanism must be put in place. The legal and international agreements are in place through UNCLOS and the Conventions and agreements reached through UNCED 92. These give together an internationally agreed and comprehensive framework for the ocean governance: an ocean constitution. However, it must all be implemented and enforced. This has not yet been achieved. At the global level the General Assembly of the United Nations has established an open-ended and comprehensive consultative mechanism. This reports to the General Assembly, and has the potential to develop into a global ocean governance mechanism.

At the regional level we have the Regional Seas Conventions established through UNEP, and several other regional conventions e.g. for the Baltic and North Seas. The problem with all these is, however, that they are not comprehensive. They are focused on the environmental aspects. The fisheries management Conventions and bodies are also sectoral. This is not sufficient. A comprehensive mechanism is needed which can involve all relevant parties (or stakeholders) and sectors, as well as various parts of society, i.e. governments, private industry, the civil society including NGOs.

ICES comes quite close to being a comprehensive regional mechanism. ICES is, however, focusing on the scientific aspects and the application of the scientific results. Its national counterparts are primarily the national fisheries institutions, but involve also universities and environmental agencies. ICES has also established close links with the EU, as well as with the other regional Conventions in the ICES Area, including of course the fisheries management ones. However, this does not constitute a satisfactory comprehensive mechanism, such as the open-ended UN consultation mechanism represents. What ICES now could do on entering its second century of existence, is to work with the EU to establish a comprehensive ocean governance mechanism for all the European Seas. The ICES Area is larger - but the European Seas do need an accepted international governance mechanism and constitute an ocean matching to the EU. The mechanism should include all stakeholders as indicated above, and as in the case of the open-ended UN consultation mechanism. Such could be organized through the EU, with ICES fulfilling an advisory role, as a broad professional ocean organization open to all interests. The focus on science and its applications, and to some extent education, is a good argument in favour of a leading role for ICES, since these elements and sectors under-write all others. ICES is also a basic organization for management of ocean observations and data, as well as for testing and advising on comprehensive ocean modelling with models that can be used for management and analyses of development scenarios. ICES has experiences in all the relevant matters and can draw on resource institutions. The experiences must now be used to move to the next step: comprehensive ocean governance. ICES could be a very important lobbying mechanism for achieving this.

Invited Lectures

ICES and the Coastal Module of GOOS

Thomas C. Malone
Co-Chair of the GOOS Coastal Ocean Observing Panel (COOP) and the US GOOS Steering Committee

The mandate to establish a Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) was articulated and ratified as an international consensus in 1992 with the signing of the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biodiversity, and the Program of Action for Sustainable Development (Agenda 21) at the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro. In particular, Agenda 21 calls for the establishment of a global ocean observing system that will enable effective management and sustainable utilization of the marine environment and its natural resources. Achieving this broad and ambitious goal depends on the capability to repeatedly assess and anticipate changes in the status of coastal ecosystems and living resources on national to global scales.

The effort to respond to this mandate is led by the GOOS Steering Committee (GSC). Overall responsibility for the development of GOOS is delegated by the sponsors to the IOC, which is advised by the joint IOC-WMO-UNEP Intergovernmental Committee for GOOS (I-GOOS). I-GOOS is responsible for the formulation of policies and assists in gaining government approval of and support for implementation. GOOS is envisioned as a global network that systematically acquires and disseminates data and data-products in response to the needs of governments, industries, scientists, educators, non-governmental organizations, and the public for information on marine and estuarine environments and resources. To this end, the immediate objective is to develop an internationally accepted plan for coordinating, enhancing, and supplementing existing monitoring and research programs to provide the data and information required for more timely detection and prediction of changes in the condition of coastal ecosystems and the resources they support.

The observing system is being developed through two related and convergent modules: (1) a basin scale module concerned primarily with the role of the ocean in the earth's climate system (Ocean Observations Panel for Climate, OOPC) and (2) a coastal module concerned primarily (but not exclusively) with changes in coastal environments and their impacts on society and the goods and services provided by coastal marine and estuarine ecosystems (Coastal Ocean Observations Panel, COOP). Coastal GOOS is intended to provide the data and information required to more effectively manage and mitigate the effects of human activities and climate variability on (1) marine services, (2) public safety and health, (3) the condition of coastal marine and estuarine ecosystems, and (4) living marine resources. Achieving these goals depends on more timely detection and prediction of changes occurring in coastal ecosystems, from changes in sea state and coastal flooding to eutrophication and the sustainability of living resources. Successful implementation of coastal GOOS will increase the value to society of research and monitoring in marine and estuarine ecosystems, in part by providing the data and information required to meet the conditions of existing international treaties and conventions and in part by providing the means to routinely assess and predict the status of marine and estuarine ecosystems.

Since Rio '92, significant progress has been made in the design and implementation of the basin-scale, ocean-climate module of GOOS. In contrast, although a high priority of the international community, progress in the development of the coastal module has been slow. This is primarily a consequence of (1) the challenge of designing and implementing an internationally accepted system that will provide the data and information required to detect and predict changes in a wide diversity of phenomena that are occurring in a complex mosaic of coastal ecosystems; (2) inefficient data management systems that do not capture significant amounts of relevant data and do not enable rapid collation of diverse data from disparate sources; (3) the primitive state of our capacity to rapidly and routinely detect and predict changes in those phenomena of interest that require measurements of biological and chemical variables; (4) the absence of mechanisms (institutional and fiscal) for the selective transition of research activities and products into an operational framework based on user needs; and (5) the challenges of developing the regional and global partnerships needed to fund the implementation of the coastal module.

Meeting these challenges will require more effective coordination and collaboration among existing regional programmes, including Regional Seas Conventions, Regional Fishery Bodies, the Large Marine Ecosystem Programme, and Regional GOOS Alliances. ICES has a 100 year history of facilitating international collaboration in fisheries science and of providing data and information in support of fisheries management in the NE Atlantic, North Sea, and the Baltic Sea. With the restructuring of its science committees, the Council has recognized the need for more integrated, ecosystem-based approaches to fisheries management that consider both the effects of larger scales forcings (e.g., ENSO, NAO, and land use in coastal drainage basins) and the hierarchy of interactions that constitute marine ecosystems. Today ICES is at an important cross road in its evolution. On one hand, there is the growing need for sound, interdisciplinary science as the basis for formulating ecologically and economically sound management strategies for sustainable fisheries. On the other, there is a growing need for more timely and routine access to data, information, and advice as the means to manage fisheries for sustainability. By themselves, existing programs, including ICES, do not and will not have sufficient resources to engage in both regional-global scale and ecosystem-based approaches in both research and operational modes.

The successful development of the ICES-EuroGOOS North Sea pilot project has the potential to serve as a model for the regional development of integrated coastal observing systems worldwide. The purpose of this presentation is to stimulate discussion on how ICES can continue to build on its strengths while contributing to the implementation of a regional building block of the coastal module of GOOS. Areas of emphasis will include: (1) enhancing the capacity to rapidly communicate, manage, and assimilate diverse data of known quality from disparate sources (ICES Oceanographic Data Centre-EuroGOOS Data Centres); (2) improving coupled physical-ecological models to make predictions with acceptable skill (ICES-GLOBEC); (3) developing technologies to rapidly measure and telemeter key physical, chemical, and biological variables synoptically in time and space with greater resolution (ICES-GLOBEC-EuroGOOS); and (4) fostering synergy between monitoring, modelling, and research. These will be addressed in the context of a status report on the effort to formulate design and implementation plans for the coastal module of GOOS on a global scale.

Fish Stock Management is an Unsolved Ecological Problem

Alan Longhurst
Retired biological oceanographer and author of recent book entitled "Ecological Geography of the Sea"

It is widely believed that if only politicians and the industry would permit it to happen, sustained management of fish stocks is feasible by recourse to one or more of the well-known family of stock assessment models. But all these models ignore, as they must, some of the ecological consequences of a fishery both on the fish population and on its habitat. Generally, we believe that for a fishery to be successful, the exploited population should become younger, smaller, and faster-growing than in its pristine state. It is therefore a desired and inevitable consequence of industrial fishing that the age-structure of the target species should be truncated, sometimes heavily so.

That this process inevitably changes the natural relationship between the fish and its habitat, including its predators and prey, is generally ignored even in age-structured models. But in fish, as in all other animals, life history traits like longevity, fecundity, and age at maturity have evolved so that each population performs optimally in relation to the exigencies and possibilities of its specific habitat. Any departure from the natural values must, therefore, render the species less fit in some often unknown manner. Put another way, a successful fishery creates 'new' species, characterised by values for life history traits that may be appropriate to an entirely different habitat. We usually assume that specific fitness is not thereby degraded, but what if we are wrong?

In fact, study of many case histories from both cold and warm seas suggests that this assumption is indeed false except where the entire habitat, as in aquaculture, is under our control. Longevity, for example, has ecological significance far beyond its simple physiological relationships with temperature or growth rate. Species having high recruitment variability, where this is importantly a function of environmental variability, tend to live exceptionally long lives apparently relatively independent of water temperature. The same is apparently true of those demersal fish that occupy territory as adults. Other relationships are less clear, but can be adduced.

For many species, recruitment appears to be the critical phase in the life cycle, for which retention of natural values for life history traits may be essential. This is suggested by the abandonment of planktonic larvae in favour of direct development in some very high latitude species where the planktonic phase would have an unusually high level of unreliability. In this, these species follow the example of many benthic invertebrates of the same regions. Industrial fishing also has indirect consequences for the fish fauna through habitat modification. It is increasingly understood that this is a non-trivial process, whose effects cannot yet be factored into any standard stock assessment procedure.

If my analysis is anything like correct, then fish stock management must be considered an unsolved ecological problem, and the use of any stock assessment model must be approached with great caution. Traditional mathematical simulations of fish population dynamics would perhaps perform impeccably for a farmed stock, isolated from the natural world, but they risk giving a false sense of rationality when applied to populations in their natural habitat. Models must be precise, they are comforting and they convince managers and politicians, but what if they lie? It is certainly timely to re-examine our assumptions about their use, but the real conundrum, of course, is that without them how are we to set catch quotas? In any event, my take-home thought must be that management procedures have suffered from an excess of mathematics, and insufficient simple ecological commonsense. It is time to redress the balance.