IMBER Open Science Conference: Future Ocean

Deadline for abstract

submission:

31st January 2014!!!!

The Call for Abstracts is open!

Deadline for Registration (standard fee): 1^st March 2014

Integrated Marine Biogeochemistry and Ecosystem Research (IMBER)
IMBER Open Science Conference - 23-27 June 2014, Bergen, Norway
“Future Oceans – Research for marine sustainability:
multiple stressors, drivers, challenges and solutions”
http://www.imber.info/index.php/Meetings/IMBER-OSC-2014

Workshop 5: Marine regime shifts around the globe: the societal challenges

to be held on Monday 23^rd June 2014, and will be part of the IMBER Open Science Conference, 23-27 June 2014, Bergen, Norway. The proposed workshop is interdisciplinary. It addresses IMBER research Theme 2 (Sensitivity to Global Change), and Theme 4 (Responses of Society).

Conveners:  Alessandra Conversi, Christian Möllmann, Martin Edwards, Carl Folke, and Sebastian Villasante.

FOCUS OF THE WORKSHOP

RATIONALE: Regime shifts are phenomena during which an ecosystem can unexpectedly and abruptly shift between two different dynamic states. Marine regime shifts are ubiquitous in the world ocean, and are expected to occur more frequently in the future, because of ongoing climate change and increasing human impacts, which lead to a decline in ecosystem resilience. Regime shifts have also been reported in limnology, estuarine, and terrestrial ecology. Regime shifts are a substantial challenge for ocean ecosystem-based management since they are largely unpredictable, difficult to anticipate and in the best case costly to reverse or mitigate. Potentially regime shifts carry unforeseen changes in the provision of ecosystem services to humanity (e.g., collapses of fisheries, habitat reduction), which can have substantial impacts on human economies and societies.

AIM: The aim of this IMBER workshop is to enlarge the scope of marine regime shift research towards the importance of linkages between the ecological and social systems. This entails investigating impacts of ecological regime shifts on economies but also on social systems with potential feedbacks on the ecosystem. The overall objective of the workshop is to build on the present scientific understanding in order to explore the best strategies to forecast, mitigate or adapt to regime shifts, and to evaluate the range of possible marine policy actions. To achieve this objective, this workshop will bring together experts from both natural and social-economic sciences in order to discuss how to predict and mitigate the effects of ecological marine regime shifts on human societies; to identify the key challenges in this area; to propose possible future scenarios; to evaluate policy and management options; and to build a multidisciplinary (ecology, economics, policy) network to address these issues.

OUTPUT: The output of the workshop will be a position paper outlying future routes towards an integrative research agenda on marine regime shifts.

Who Should Attend? Members of the research community, including those from physical, natural and social sciences and humanities, interested in exchanging ideas on marine regime shifts and their impacts on ecology, economics and other social sciences, especially in the framework of global change and the transition towards marine sustainability.
Policy advisors and decision makers concerned with the impacts of ecological regime shifts on the marine environment and on society, and other interested stakeholders including representatives from local communities and resource managers, and all those interested in exchanging ideas with the marine science community on information most useful for their decision-making needs.

Questions?

Please contact Kate Brailsford (maed@sahfos.ac.uk; katbra@sahfos.ac.uk)