The Human Dimension of Marine Conservation

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are prime challenges for international communities to implement. The SDGs are presented as independent goals to be met by the international community. However, many of these global targets are co-dependent, and identifying the relationships between targets can enable strategies to achieve simultaneous success. We propose to identify the co-benefits of strategies by identifying what targets are effectively addressed by strategies aimed at other targets.

Recently, an analysis of global progress toward achieving SDGs highlighted the lack of progress on SDG 14: Life Below Water (this is the only SDG goal with no targets achieved). Yet, the ocean is integral to many aspects of sustainable development, being an important source of food and other raw materials, and being important for cultures around the world. We focus on characterizing the dependencies of SDGs on the targets for achieving a sustainable ocean. Ultimately we like to develop this map to be used as the guide for international policy development as well as reveal the opportunity for the global community to achieve transformative pathways of sustainable development.

This lecture presents a framework for identifying the dependencies (co-benefits) and hindrances (trade-offs) among path-dependent relationships. This framework was used to characterize the contributions of the ocean sustainability targets to other Sustainable Development Goal targets.

The state of global oceans limits the potential to achieve far-reaching sustainability, yet this is currently the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal with the least identified progress, and has received the least financial support. The framework presented in this lecture can be used to explore relationships among other Sustainable Development Goal targets or similar multi-goal policies, and can be modified to specific contexts (such as national or regional scales). In particular, it allows for an understanding of the prevalence of positive versus negative relationships between ocean sustainability and other Sustainable Development Goals.