Ecosystem services economic valuation (ESV) is often presented as an effective tool for decision-makers to achieve sustainable development objectives. Yet social processes leading to decisions call for a pragmatic, demand-driven - as opposed to supply-driven - approach to ensure ESV are actually used and make a difference. Based on an overview of ESV conducted in the Pacific island region and beyond, this paper builds on a two-fold diagnosis: (i) Experience from the Pacific and elsewhere shows both growing interest for ESV in support of island conservation and climate change resilience, and growing concern over the lack of use of such valuations when they are conducted; and (ii) Experience so far has been based on what economists have to offer rather than based on stakeholders' needs. This paper presents lessons learnt from a five-year coastal resilience project which advocated and put to the test a demand-driven approach to ESV in several Pacific island countries and territories.

Current emission reduction pledges under the 2015 Paris Agreement are insufficient to keep global temperature “well below +2°C” in 2100 relative to pre-industrial levels and to reach targets of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Increased political ambition is therefore required, as well as enhanced efforts in terms of both mitigation and ecosystem and human adaptation. There is growing evidence highlighting both the role the ocean plays in mitigating anthropogenic climate change (i.e., absorption of atmospheric heat and anthropogenic carbon), and the cascading consequences on its chemistry and physics (i.e., ocean warming, acidification, deoxygenation, sea-level rise), ecosystems and ecosystem services. In such a context, a critical question arises: what are the ocean-based opportunities for climate action? In other words, what is the potential of the ocean and its ecosystems to reduce the causes of climate change and its impacts? This document summarises the main findings of The Ocean Solutions Initiative1 that assessed the potential of 13 ocean-based measures.

The Paris Agreement target of limiting global surface warming to 1.5-2 degrees C compared to pre-industrial levels by 2100 will still heavily impact the ocean. While ambitious mitigation and adaptation are both needed, the ocean provides major opportunities for action to reduce climate change globally and its impacts on vital ecosystems and ecosystem services. A comprehensive and systematic assessment of 13 global- and local-scale, ocean-based measures was performed to help steer the development and implementation of technologies and actions toward a sustainable outcome. We show that (1) all measures have tradeoffs and multiple criteria must be used for a comprehensive assessment of their potential, (2) greatest benefit is derived by combining global and local solutions, some of which could be implemented or scaled-up immediately, (3) some measures are too uncertain to be recommended yet, (4) political consistency must be achieved through effective cross-scale governance mechanisms, (5) scientific effort must focus on effectiveness, co-benefits, disbenefits, and costs of poorly tested as well as new and emerging measures.

"Chapter 25: Regional oceans governance: making Regional Seas programmes, regional fishery bodies and large marine ecosystem mechanisms work better together" published on 24 Feb 2017 by Edward Elgar Publishing.

In the aftermath of COP21, potential post-2030 emission trajectories and their consistency with the 2 °C target are a core concern for the ocean scientific community in light of the end-century risks of impact scenarios.

The development of regional governance for the protection of the environment, sustainable use of natural resources and conservation of its biodiversity is unquestionably a cornerstone of international environmental law and policy. With regard to marine and coastal issues, it has mainly been taking place through Regional Seas programmes, Regional Fishery Bodies and Large Marine Ecosystems mechanisms. Based on a similar geographical approach, however, these regional mechanisms raise concerns relating to their coordination and efficiency, and possibly overlap in what they aim to achieve. This paper provides a review of existing regional oceans governance mechanisms, assessing their individual and collective capacities to move towards ecosystem-based management, and highlighting options to make the regional landscape more coherent and effective.

The ocean moderates anthropogenic climate change at the cost of profound alterations of its physics, chemistry, ecology, and services. Here, we evaluate and compare the risks of impacts on marine and coastal ecosystems—and the goods and services they provide—for growing cumulative carbon emissions under two contrasting emissions scenarios. The current emissions trajectory would rapidly and significantly alter many ecosystems and the associated services on which humans heavily depend. A reduced emissions scenario—consistent with the Copenhagen Accord's goal of a global temperature increase of less than 2°C—is much more favorable to the ocean but still substantially alters important marine ecosystems and associated goods and services. The management options to address ocean impacts narrow as the ocean warms and acidifies. Consequently, any new climate regime that fails to minimize ocean impacts would be incomplete and inadequate.

Dans un contexte en constante évolution, l’élaboration, la mise en œuvre et l’évaluation des politiques publiques de biodiversité nécessitent d’anticiper les changements futurs possibles afin de pouvoir se préparer à temps. Or les informations concernant ces changements sont nombreuses et les enjeux qui pourraient s’avérer importants à l’avenir sont souvent peu visibles. Pour répondre à ce défi, une expertise multiacteurs et multidisciplinaire s’inspirant des démarches d’horizon scanning et intitulée BioPIQuE 2013 a permis d’identifier 25 questions émergentes, dont 10 questions stratégiques, pour les politiques publiques de biodiversité en France métropolitaine d’ici à 2020. Ces questions émergentes sont autant d’opportunités et de risques que l’ensemble des acteurs qui souhaitent avancer vers une plus grande prise en compte des enjeux de biodiversité peuvent saisir.

Entered into force in 2011, the Protocol on Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) in the Mediterranean is a major innovation in that it is the first supra-State legal instrument aimed at coastal zone management. However, the nature and magnitude of change it is actually generating, or is likely to generate, in domestic coastal zones management systems, are highly uncertain. Investigating such prospects for change in contrasted contexts around the Mediterranean, and therefore providing a critical view of the Protocol as a game-changer, is the aim of this article. Results call for vigilance: the risk is real that the Protocol will not change much and that it will become a paper-protocol only. Ratifying it is – relatively – easy. Avoiding “ratifications of convenience” is more demanding. For various reasons the Protocol is likely to have mostly limited impacts on domestic coastal law development. It probably has more potential in terms of influencing changes in governance processes and increasing the social demand for ICZM. But this potential may only be translated into facts under stringent conditions on political will and good faith from Parties to adopt an ambitious understanding of the Protocol, and on appropriation by civil societies around the Mediterranean.

Ecosystem Services economic Valuation (ESV) is often seen as a tool that can potentially enhance our collective choices regarding ecosystem services as it factors in the costs and benefits of their degradation. Yet, to achieve this, the social processes leading to decisions need to use ESV effectively. This makes it necessary to understand if and how ESV is or is not used by decision-makers. However, there appears to be a literature blindspot as to the issue of the Use of Ecosystem Services economic Valuation (UESV). This paper proposes a systematic review on UESV in peer-reviewed scientific literature. It shows that this literature gives little attention to this issue and rarely reports cases where ESV has been put to actual use, even though such use is frequently referred to as founding the goal and justification of ESV. The review identifies three categories of potential UESV: decisive, technical and informative, which are usually mentioned as prospects for the valuations published. Two sets of hypotheses are examined to explain this result: either the use of ESV is a common practice, but is absent from the literature reviewed here; or the use of ESV is effectively rare. These hypotheses are discussed and open up further avenues of research which should make the actual use of ESV their core concern.

Ocean acidification has emerged over the last two decades as one of the largest threats to marine organisms and ecosystems. However, most research efforts on ocean acidification have so far neglected management and related policy issues to focus instead on understanding its ecological and biogeochemical implications. This shortfall is addressed here with a systematic, international and critical review of management and policy options. In particular, we investigate the assumption that fighting acidification is mainly, but not only, about reducing CO2 emissions, and explore the leeway that this emerging problem may open in old environmental issues. We review nine types of management responses, initially grouped under four categories: preventing ocean acidification; strengthening ecosystem resilience; adapting human activities; and repairing damages. Connecting and comparing options leads to classifying them, in a qualitative way, according to their potential and feasibility. While reducing CO2 emissions is confirmed as the key action that must be taken against acidification, some of the other options appear to have the potential to buy time, e.g. by relieving the pressure of other stressors, and help marine life face unavoidable acidification. Although the existing legal basis to take action shows few gaps, policy challenges are significant: tackling them will mean succeeding in various areas of environmental management where we failed to a large extent so far.

When adopting the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), States recognised “the desirability of establishing through this Convention, (...) a legal order for the seas and oceans which will facilitate international communication and will promote the peaceful uses of the seas and oceans, the equitable and efficient utilisation of their resources, the conservation of their living resources and the study, protection and preservation of the marine environment”.1 Yet, more than 30 years after the adoption of this international agreement, the question is raised by the international community of whether these ambitious goals have been reached, especially those relating to the governance of marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ). According to UNCLOS, ABNJ encompass the high seas and the Area2 which, combined together, represent around half of the planet’s surface and a significant amount of its biodiversity. These two areas have a different legal status: a traditional regime of freedom applies in the high seas, whereas the Area and its mineral resources are the common heritage of mankind. Over the past decades, the international community has become more and more aware of the increasing threats to ABNJ, e.g. overexploitation of fish stocks, use of destructive fishing practices, ocean acidification, pollution of the marine environment and emergence of threats linked to deep-sea mining or geo-engineering activities.

Economic valuations have raised high expectations to influence policy and alleviate the accelerating degradation of the environment. This was reaffirmed by the publication of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) report, during the Tenth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Nagoya in 2010. Decision IV/10 of COP 101 recognizes economic valuation as a key tool for a more effective mainstreaming of biodiversity-related considerations. In many scientific publications as well, the “measurement” of monetary values that reflect the social importance of ecosystem services is seen as a prerequisite for better management decisions (e.g. Daily et al., 2009). But heated debates have been ongoing for years. While ecologists Myers and Richert (1997) declared their faith in economics (“We don’t protect what we don’t value”), economist Heal (2000), in contrast, stated: “Valuation is neither necessary nor sufficient for conservation. We conserve much that we do not value, and do not conserve much that we value”. Balmford et al. (2011) even made it a positive statement: “[For many reasons] there is validity in calling for societal choices, especially in the domain of environmental decision-making, to be made without recourse to valuation or with the results of a cost-benefit analysis being a single component in a larger body of evidence”. Though the debate exists, it is undeniable that international discussions and publications are now massively promoting Ecosystem Services Economic Valuation (ESV) as a tool susceptible to make key contributions to biodiversity protection. Questioning the supposed pragmatism and influence of ESV, while standing clear from ideological statements, is thus both timely and vital. ESV methods are now highly mature. They have been the subject of a large and growing literature since the beginning of the 1990s (e.g. Adamowicz, 200). Yet, economic valuation is not sufficient in itself. The hope that it will become an efficient political lever to alleviate

The last four decades have seen a considerable development of regional environmental law, especially within the United Nations Environment Programme's Regional Seas Programme. However, implementation remains far from satisfactory. Among the enabling conditions that would favour more systematic implementation, appropriate institutional frameworks are key. It is therefore timely to examine the various ways in which institutional developments may keep up with legal progress. This article provides an international overview of institutional arrangements set up in various regional seas frameworks, and underlines common patterns as well as the variety of options experienced. It then sheds light on the Nairobi Convention framework as a typical case of a gap between legal and institutional developments. It draws on the worldwide review to explore a number of ways by which the institutional framework in the Western Indian Ocean region could be brought up to speed with the legal framework.