From decision-making to Oceans Accounts: a case study

Abstract

Earth systems are nowadays on the verge of radical disruptions, whether due to unprecedented demographic pressures or as a result of the current complexity of global systems. Climate Changes, ecosystems unbalances, natural resources depletion, pollution, extreme events, natural catastrophes, humanized overpopulated environments, as well as economical turbulences, represent more than ever, very uncertain terms of an equation that is difficult to balance. Novel procedures are essential to make use of local and global information that is nowadays available from multiple sources, to produce intelligible and actionable models for sustainable development, in particular for the oceans protection, the main support of human life on earth. An example of this procedures is the Oceans Accounts (OA) framework that aims at integrating the biophysical information, measure ecosystem services, track and measure the changes on the ecosystems and link all this data to economic and human activity within a given spatial area. This work presents a novel approach that uses spatial modeling techniques capable of dealing with limited and discrete data, such as Geostatistics. These spatial techniques, combined with remote sensing, can provide a sound background of information for the implementation and leverage of the Oceans Accounts framework. Moreover, an emphasis will be given to the application of the OA framework to marine protected areas (MPA's) with an identification of the main gaps regarding the cycle of collecting, processing and integrating social, environmental and economic data. The main focus will be on enabling the next generation of decision support systems to support design and impact assessment of alternative engineering solutions for marine contexts, such as energy harvesting and offshore platforms or aquaculture, in the context of blue economy, as well as marine planning and economic activities regulation.