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Obura2009-IUCN Congress report - Resilience sessions

Obura2009-IUCN Congress report - Resilience sessions.pdf

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Workshop Abstracts<br />

Building resilience concepts into policy – sustaining environments and people<br />

through change<br />

Streams - Healthy environments – healthy people/Oceans and climate change<br />

October 8 2008, 18:30-20:00<br />

Paul Marshall Director, Climate Change, Great<br />

Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority<br />

(GBRMPA)<br />

Facilitator and Converting socio-political momentum<br />

into conservation action in the Great Barrier Reef.<br />

Jennie Hoffman Senior Scientist, EcoAdapt Motivating adaptation to climate change in marine<br />

systems.<br />

Dan Laffoley Chief Scientist’s team, Natural Making climate science relevant to policy: The UK<br />

England<br />

Climate <strong>report</strong> card.<br />

Kent Carpenter Director, Global Marine Species Red Listing Coral Species: Strategies and<br />

Assessment. Professor, Old Dominion<br />

University<br />

opportunities to strengthen marine conservation<br />

policy and action in the Coral Triangle Region.<br />

Greg Stone Vice President, Global Marine<br />

Programmes, New England Aquarium,<br />

and Phoenix Islands Protected Area.<br />

Wilderness area protection and sustainable financing<br />

in a Small Island Developing State – Kiribati<br />

Lynne Hale The Nature Conservancy The Honolulu Declaration on ocean acidification and<br />

coral reef management.<br />

Nadine Marshall Sustainable Ecosystems, CSIRO An approach to building the human dimension into<br />

marine conservation<br />

The presentations highlight several policy approaches that have been successful in different contexts<br />

in approaching the problem of climate change for coral reef management. Discussion will focus on<br />

some of the challenges in developing and applying policy, and opportunities for policy action. The aim<br />

is to identify opportunities to improve the adoption of science and management recommendations for<br />

coping with climate change, and generalizing from coral reefs to other vulnerable ecosystems.<br />

Resilient Policy, Resilient Reefs: How Do We Get There? Jennifer Hoffman<br />

Science, management, and policy represent three levels at which action can be taken to support reef<br />

resilience. Science provides the data to inform management and policy. Management represents the<br />

application of the scientific information to achieve a desired set of results. Policy provides the context<br />

in which management decisions are made and carried out, the philosophical framework for linking<br />

science with action. Unlike science and management, policy must reflect both data AND societal<br />

values. A resilient policy will be able to absorb changes in science, and will reflect deeply-held<br />

societal values unlikely to change rapidly.<br />

Because the field of resilience-based policy is relatively undeveloped, both practical examples and<br />

theory are a bit thin. I will therefore build this concept note around a series of questions, namely:<br />

1. How can policy help or hinder coral reef resilience?<br />

2. How might we motivate and implement resilience-based policy at different levels?<br />

3. What is the right level at which to formulate policy that really makes a difference?<br />

1. How can policy help or hinder coral reef resilience?<br />

For communities of resource users, managers, or scientists who already want to increase resilience,<br />

policy should facilitate or at least not hinder their ability to take necessary action. This should<br />

generally include providing financial and governance mechanisms for ongoing funding, leadership,<br />

outreach, and capacity-building. Ideally, policies should be written with recognition of the appropriate<br />

spatial and temporal scales for maximizing actions to support the resilience of coral reef ecosystems.<br />

In the case of a rapidly-evolving field like climate change conservation, policy needs to allow for the<br />

development and application of new management tools. A policy that mandates fixed five-year<br />

management plans, for instance, would make it more difficult for managers to put new information into<br />

practice during the five-eyar term. In contrast, a policy that provides explicit guidance for putting<br />

adaptive management into practice would be more likely to increase ecosystem resilience. For<br />

instance, the Environmental Impact Statement/Report for the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project<br />

in California, USA, identifies modeling, monitoring, and applied studies needed to address<br />

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