06-09/06/2016 - Summer School “Marine ecosystem services, management and governance: linking social and ecological research” (Spain)

Organized by AZTI, SYKE and Plymouth Marine Laboratory, the summer school will be held from 6th to 9th June 2016 (coinciding with the week of the Oceans’ Day on 8th June), at the Aquarium of San Sebastian (Spain). This is the 13th AZTI’s Summer School and the 4th DEVOTES Summer School.

The topic for this summer school relates to marine ecosystem services and the links between their assessment, mapping and the need for a socio-ecological framework to address the important management issues related to the governance of the oceans. Governing the oceans and keeping them in a healthy state requires activities at sea to be sustainable, so that the ecosystem services provided by the oceans and the functionality of the ecosystems can be maintained.

The attendees will acquire new knowledge on recent trends in marine research, in relation to the management and governance of our oceans. This summer school will focus on the integration of different sciences (i.e. social, economic and ecological) as a means to enhance the potential of our oceans through adequate management and governance, for which assessment and mapping of ecosystem services is crucial. This course will explore this at different spatial scales and in management and governance applications (e.g. to the European Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), the Water Framework Directive (WFD), the Biodiversity Strategy 2020; etc.). Hence, the main objective of the school is to give an overview on ecosystem services assessment, and its relationship with ocean and coastal livelihoods, management and governance.

This objective is aligned with current concerns that multiple EU-marine related policies (e.g., new Common Fisheries Policy, Integrated Maritime Policy, MSFD, WFD, Habitats and Birds Directives, Maritime Spatial Planning, etc.), strategies (i.e. Blue Growth, Biodiversity and Smart Growth strategies) and international agreements (E.g. OSPAR, HELCOM, Convention on Biological Diversity, etc.) converge and in some cases overlap, all with the clear objective of maintaining the oceans in a healthy state, but making management of marine ecosystems and resources rather complex.

Together with EU projects which have worked on this topic (e.g. VECTORS, DEVOTES), the training of attendees to the school will promote the implementation of the abovementioned directives and strategies, assisting managers and stakeholders in a better understanding of the oceans and an adequate implementation.

As an important outcome of this course (in addition to the presentations, which will be freely available after the school), the professors participating in the course will prepare an open access position paper on this topic, to be submitted to a broad scope scientific journal (e.g. PlosOne, Frontiers in Marine Science, etc.). This will be a cross-cutting review: Where are we now and where are we going in this topic?, What are the strengths, weaknesses and limitations of existing tools to assess ecosystem services?

This course is supported by the Euromarine Networ: "Euromarine Networ"

"AZTI"