If the idea of a healthy ocean is subjective, then how can we devise a single index that captures this variability yet still provides an overall measure? The first part of the answer is more or less straightforward, although not without its own potential pitfalls. We designed the index to capture the full portfolio of values, or goals, that people have for healthy oceans. Just like a financial portfolio, one needs to know how all the pieces are doing to have a good sense of one's overall financial well-being.
The second part of the answer is much more challenging, and gets at the heart of the controversy about how health is defined. For each goal we set targets that allowed us to determine how close to optimal each goal was in any particular place. For some goals, such as wild-caught fisheries, decades of scientific research informed our choice of targets. For other goals we used so-called SMART principles—setting reference points that are specific, measurable, ambitious, realistic and time-bound. SMART principles are used widely in resource management, business and many other fields when setting meaningful, practical goals and assessing how well they are achieved.
One can quickly see where controversy may arise in the process of setting reference points. For the goal of maintaining biodiversity, we set a reference point of all species at no risk of extinction, not for species to be free of any impact from human activities. A nation can fish for hundreds of species and still achieve a strong biodiversity goal as long as every species is being harvested sustainably. We also treated all species equally, such that a species-rich place like Australia, where most species are at healthy levels, scored high even though 417 species are at risk. If you happen to care a lot about some of those threatened species, the score will not seem right. Similarly, for the goal of providing food, countries such as Canada and Russia are under-harvesting many fish stocks and were therefore penalized (the goal is to provide as much food as possible, sustainably), even though more fishing could increase pollution or potential habitat destruction.
Similar framing of the conservation challenge has been happening on land for awhile now: How can conservation be achieved given the necessary agricultural and urban modifications to the landscape? One answer is that conservation organizations are focusing more on the value of patchwork landscapes. Rather than press for wilderness or pristine areas, for example, they are focusing on undisturbed forest adjacent to farmland, which can also promote crop yield by supporting populations of pollinating insects, or city parks that can promote biodiversity along with recreation. By recognizing the value of these patchwork landscapes, conservation priorities shift dramatically. This paradigm shift seems to be happening more slowly for the ocean, in part because people do not live there, which creates an impression that we are not as directly connected as we are to land. It is now clear, however, that people are intimately connected to the ocean in diverse and important ways. All three big conservation organizations have recently reorganized their marine efforts to embrace the idea that people are part of nature. Interestingly, however, the Ocean Health Index is the first to put these ideas into action in assessing ecosystem health. Some experts are already interested in adopting it for freshwater lakes and rivers.
Remaking conservation for the future
The initial calculation of the index is not meant to be the last word, but instead a pioneering first attempt. Later this year we will roll out its application in the U.S., Fiji and Brazil. These are the scales at which most decisions are made, and we hope the tests will make the index even more accurate and relevant. The index, for example, could help inform whether to expand offshore wind energy in the U.S., whether land or ocean conservation measures will benefit coral reefs in Fiji, and how marine zoning plans in Brazil may affect overall ocean health by allocating different uses to different parts of the ocean.
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8 Comments
Add CommentIt sounds like you are trying to address too many issues with one standard. It seems like you are trying to rate sustainability, ecosystem health and human impact all with one index. You can't. They are different. The solution is simple, use separate metrics. Ultimately the lands being rated likely require different metrics anyway. If you are rating fishing grounds, what does it matter what the human impact is? You know it is going to be huge compared to a wildlife preserve. You rate it on sustainability. The same with national parks, they are not going to be pristine. They are open to the public. But are they healthy? Can species within the park maintain their populations or is the human impact so great that populations decline. In regards to wildlife preserves, places that humans are not allowed to enter, such as mangroves or coral reefs to protect fish nurseries you need to look at human impact and minimizing that as much as possible to maximize the return from these scarce resources. I know that it is easier if you can rate everything by slapping a happy or sad face on it but if the use cases are different than use a different standard.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"I say this from experience...."..wow. Talk about ego.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou know all this from experience. I've been a geologist for 35 years and my experience is that I don't know a tenth of even the niche of science that I study.
Motherhood statements and ideals are not science. It's speculation. You can't go putting all these arbitrary ratings on eleusive variables that are themselves arbitrarily measured. Speculation built on speculation.
Lets at least celebrate the fact that people are beginning to realize the fallacy of ecosystems without human impact Cronin pointed this out in his work ""Changes in the Land" 20 years ago. The myth of wildness will serve as a poor model for dealing with our crowded planet. Clearly we can take steps to minimize the damage of the most destructive impacts but humans have been terraforming the planet since the beginning of our species and will continue to do so and that is not all bad.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSounds like they're trying to set it up so that human impact on Earth can be considered justifiable homicide.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat we humans basically lack is humility and reverence for our source of life - which is Nature, in it's pure form, providing water, seeds, plants, and animal meats for us.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe are currently faced with rapidly changing environmental conditions, which, btw, were predicted by the indigenous people whose lands we have (and continue to) swallowed up in our race to dominate Nature. We were warned, but the urge for fame and especially fortune, appears to supersede all such considerations. Add the nowadays short national attention span to that and what to you get...
... a new set of scientists that try to fit our mis-behavior into something that's natural and excusable. No thanks. Nice try, but I don't think this paper will make us feel well and fuzzy.
It's our own species' lack of humility, starting with our Western outlook that Nature was to be shaped and dominated by us. That was a big mistake. We lost sight that we are only a part of nature, not it's bosses. Then there came the resulting materialism, and it's ever-increasing greed. Just look around the world: international mega-corporations are now busy buying up the lands (or battling with their inhabitants) for our last global water and mineral resources that can produce any profits for them in the next decade. They follow the golden cow, to the detriment of all of us and the earth itself. She is showing us that we will have hell to pay for this abuse.
You are correct. They have been trying to justify grooming the entire Species Planet now for decades. Scientist are sometime the easiest people to be fooled by resource harvesters.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMore pushers of the "new" ecology? Shame!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBiology is the study of life. Conservationists conserve. What do conservation biologist conserve? Good question! The so-called "new" school conservationists such as B. S. Halpern say that the world is done and it might as well be dead. They say humans must be part of the solution when, in fact, humans are messing up the system already.
If we really have to turn the henhouse over to the fox, then there is no hope. (The henhouse = the natural world and the fox = humans.) Halpern says there is no hope without humans, but without hope and understanding in and of the natural world's abilities the Species Planet is doomed. In short, do not listen to the expeditious and practical "new" ecologists. They say the glass is half empty; we say the glass is half full.
The Evolution Planet cannot maintain itself under human grooming. We must return many acres to the sole control of natural forces and processes or the Species Planet is indeed doomed.
A human influential scale is indeed needed to assess the human interference and damage to the natural landscape and seascape; that is true. However, using that scale to justify more human management is shameful.
Interesting. His human activity scale for oceans sounds remarkably like the NLATS (natural landscape abutter threat scale) which rates human intrusion into the forest.
I read this article with great interest. I am a biologist for an Indian Tribe on the west coast of the US that has a very long history of harvesting and using resources from local intertidal areas. Recently, there has been a mandate to set aside some of these marine areas for protection by banning various types of harvest. When I raised the scientific and ecological concept that humans have been a top predator in this system since time immemorial and it would be more unnatural than natural to stop that predation, I was met with blank stares from the ecologists that were designing the network of proposed marine reserves. The idea that humans (all of us, not just indigenous) are part of something, and in some cases are as necessary as wolves in Yellowstone for ecosystems to be "natural" has not sunk in. Native Americans here actively managed salmon harvest, intertidal gathering, and landscape (through burning). Yet, the western ideal wilderness goal is "untrammelled by man" (e.g. Wilderness Act).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo, the Tribe here was told that they would no longer be able to harvest in areas that nearly a 10,000 year record of being harvested so that these areas and the animals would be protected. Needless to say, this has people pretty upset. I note that areas in other parts of the world (Mediterranean, South Africa) have over 100,000 years of continuous marine harvest.
The idea that human management is a recently developed western idea is flat out wrong; the Tribe I work for has been "managing" things through cultural practices, ceremonies, social taboos, etc. since time immemorial.
The points I make above in no way justify the degradation or overexploitation of any ecosystem, it is simply to say that humans are a legitimate part of the functioning of ecosystems throughout the world. "Natural" includes humans, and to say otherwise ignores indigenous peoples and their practices around the world.