Led by three marine science and policy experts from University of British Columbia and University of Washington, Yoshitaka Ota (UW), William Cheung (UBC) and Gerald Singh (UBC), the project focuses on enhancing sustainable development of coastal states, communities, and economies around the Pacific-Rim region. The overall aim will be to provide policy pathways to advance Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14: Life Below Water.

The project includes one survey to collect elicit export knowledge, analysis of cooperation needs, and a workshop to share the outcomes.

Objective and Background:

Achieving SDGs will have to surmount the extreme uncertainty presented by navigating global social-ecological systems as well as the growing obstacle that social inequality and global climate change presents to sustainable development.

To address these problems, expert elicitation research and document/literature review will be performed at multiple scales:
– strategic (identifying social-ecological relationships to support the SDGs);
– tactical (outlining the institutional cooperation needed to enact appropriate policy);
– operational (evaluating the effectiveness and feasibility of specific options to reduce risks of climate change impacts).

This research will be done by integrating multi-disciplinary perspectives and knowledge to identify
1) potential co-benefits and tradeoffs between the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) and the SDG Ocean targets;
2) the institutional organization needed for advancing SDG targets;
3) the best solutions across the Pacific to reduce climate change impacts.

General Methodology:

The project consists of a survey and workshops.
1) Eliciting expert knowledge through surveys to identify co-benefits and trade-offs among SDG targets at national scales within the Pacific region, using and established framework on SDG linkages.
2) Conduct a review of government and institutes to determine the institutional cooperation needed to achieve SDG Ocean targets trade-off structure determined by the survey.
3) Conduct a workshop with technical experts to determine the effectiveness of proposed climate change impact mitigation solutions

Schedule:

Survey (February-August 2018); Literature review of institutes (August-November 2018); Workshop (December 2018)