Report on Future of the Seas and Oceans Submitted to G7

ICREA research professor at ICTA-UAB Patrizia Ziveri is part of the international expert group that submitted a special report for policymakers on oceans and seas to the science ministers of the United States, Canada, Japan, France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy - known as the Group of Seven (G7) – before their meeting in Japan on 15-17 May.

The report, which was coordinated by the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) via the International Association of Physical Sciences of the Oceans (IAPSO) and the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) of the International Council for Science (ICSU), focusses on seven critical marine research issues. The topics are plastic pollution of the marine environment, deep-sea mining, ocean acidification, ocean warming, de-oxygenation, biodiversity loss and marine ecosystem degradation.

The report came in response to concern expressed by the G7 Science Ministers on these issues at their meeting in Berlin last year. The ministers decided to set up an ad-hoc working group of experts with the intention of developing a white paper related to these topics, and to suggest ways of strengthening international co-operation and co-ordination in the sciences of the oceans and seas and address societal needs. There was a direct call to the international scientific community in the 2015 Communique "to understand the ocean as a whole through international scientific cooperation" and to increase efforts and forecast, manage and improve the changing marine environment and its influence on the marine ecosystem.

The white paper contains different chapters in each of the topics, each of them written by two experts. Dr Patrizia Ziveri and Paul Snelgrove from Canada were in charge of writing the chapter on “Biodiversity Loss”. In this chapter, Ziveri and Snelgrove state that the ocean supports a very wide range of biological diversity, underpinning the health of the planet and providing many human benefits, and state that our knowledge of marine biodiversity is relatively poor: the majority of species have probably not yet been discovered.

The chapter warns that, without careful management, impacts on biodiversity will endanger some of the most vulnerable marine habitats around the world, as well as bring high costs to human society, and indicates that sustainable development and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions can help to avert ecological problems. Marine  protected  areas (MPAs)  and  similar  interventions  can  also  help  to  maintain  diversity  and function.

In the chapter, specific G7 actions are identified to coordinate research, improve  marine  protection  and support knowledge exchange.

Read the report here