But nonetheless essential. The pervasive importance of the ocean to human well-being led the United Nations to identify an explicit Ocean Sustainable Development Goal when it crafted its highest priority areas for the 2015?030 agenda (5). Many of the over 150 coastal nations, especially developing ones, are taking a fresh look at the ocean for new opportunities for economic development, poverty alleviation, and food security. The significant promise of this so-called “Blue Economy” (6, 7) will be realized and continued only if activities are actually sustainable. A rush to exploit ocean resources could repeat or even exacerbate mistakes of the past, eroding the resilience of ocean ecosystems and causing long-term economic and social harm.COLLOQUIUM PAPERand social science are being developed and implemented by a diverse set of actors. For example, XAV-939 web robust progress has been made in: fishery reforms (12?4); community efforts that combine biodiversity protection with sustainable fishing (14); smart spatial planning in coastal regions to reduce conflict between different ocean uses and consider cumulative impacts (15); international collaboration to rein in destructive illegal fishing (16); and creation of large fully protected marine reserves (17), among others. These successes are encouraging. Although few of these reforms are currently implemented at the scale needed to influence the global trajectory, these models can empower communities, incentivize businesses, inspire leaders, improve human well-being, strengthen economies, and create a tsunami of change. A major question that remains is how to learn from, replicate, and scale up these successes. The science underpinning these successful efforts reflects significant interdisciplinary progress in understanding the functioning of ocean ecosystems and the services they provide, the factors affecting human values and choices, and the deep connections across social, economic, and ecological systems: for example, through ecosystem services (2), planetary boundaries (18), and telecoupling (19). A Complex Adaptive System Perspective: The Theory Replicating and scaling-up ocean conservation successes will require a deeper understanding of the elements that confer success and the impediments that prevent progress. The idea that ocean ecosystems are complex, adaptive, and interconnected with social and economic systems is a central tenet. Rather than separate systems, ecological and social systems can be viewed as a single, coupled system integrated through connections and feedbacks (20, 21). These coupled systems fit into a more general category of complex adaptive systems (CASs): systems where the behaviors of individual actors at the local scale influence interactions and emergent properties at the regional or global scale (22). Emergent properties, in turn, can feed back to the small scale and influence subsequent behaviors of the individuals. Although these actors may largely act independently, the collective effect of individual behaviors influences the larger-scale properties such that actors adapt to the changing conditions of the system context (23). One insight emerging from a CAS framework is that the goal of management–and a major departure from previous approaches– should be to enhance robustness and resilience of the system, rather than trying to control the system state itself (23?5). CASs display nonlinearities, slow feedbacks, unexpected changes, tipping points, GW610742 site thresholds, and.But nonetheless essential. The pervasive importance of the ocean to human well-being led the United Nations to identify an explicit Ocean Sustainable Development Goal when it crafted its highest priority areas for the 2015?030 agenda (5). Many of the over 150 coastal nations, especially developing ones, are taking a fresh look at the ocean for new opportunities for economic development, poverty alleviation, and food security. The significant promise of this so-called “Blue Economy” (6, 7) will be realized and continued only if activities are actually sustainable. A rush to exploit ocean resources could repeat or even exacerbate mistakes of the past, eroding the resilience of ocean ecosystems and causing long-term economic and social harm.COLLOQUIUM PAPERand social science are being developed and implemented by a diverse set of actors. For example, robust progress has been made in: fishery reforms (12?4); community efforts that combine biodiversity protection with sustainable fishing (14); smart spatial planning in coastal regions to reduce conflict between different ocean uses and consider cumulative impacts (15); international collaboration to rein in destructive illegal fishing (16); and creation of large fully protected marine reserves (17), among others. These successes are encouraging. Although few of these reforms are currently implemented at the scale needed to influence the global trajectory, these models can empower communities, incentivize businesses, inspire leaders, improve human well-being, strengthen economies, and create a tsunami of change. A major question that remains is how to learn from, replicate, and scale up these successes. The science underpinning these successful efforts reflects significant interdisciplinary progress in understanding the functioning of ocean ecosystems and the services they provide, the factors affecting human values and choices, and the deep connections across social, economic, and ecological systems: for example, through ecosystem services (2), planetary boundaries (18), and telecoupling (19). A Complex Adaptive System Perspective: The Theory Replicating and scaling-up ocean conservation successes will require a deeper understanding of the elements that confer success and the impediments that prevent progress. The idea that ocean ecosystems are complex, adaptive, and interconnected with social and economic systems is a central tenet. Rather than separate systems, ecological and social systems can be viewed as a single, coupled system integrated through connections and feedbacks (20, 21). These coupled systems fit into a more general category of complex adaptive systems (CASs): systems where the behaviors of individual actors at the local scale influence interactions and emergent properties at the regional or global scale (22). Emergent properties, in turn, can feed back to the small scale and influence subsequent behaviors of the individuals. Although these actors may largely act independently, the collective effect of individual behaviors influences the larger-scale properties such that actors adapt to the changing conditions of the system context (23). One insight emerging from a CAS framework is that the goal of management–and a major departure from previous approaches– should be to enhance robustness and resilience of the system, rather than trying to control the system state itself (23?5). CASs display nonlinearities, slow feedbacks, unexpected changes, tipping points, thresholds, and.
