Nearly 800 delegates came together in Nantes at the end of September to present to the scientific community recent work conducted in many fields of marine research, and to inform the ICES Science Plan goals. ICES strongly supports scientific research in five main areas: Ecosystem Functions, Human Interactions on Ecosystems, Sustainable use of Ecosystems, as well as programmes on Regional Seas and on Ecosystem surveys Science and Technology.
A large number of parallel sessions made for difficult choices, so I opted to attend those which were most relevant to work I had done in the past as well as current interests. Bio-oceanographical modelling came high on the list, so I quickly migrated towards “Operational oceanography for fisheries and environmental applications” and “Oceanography and ecology of HAB’s (Harmful Algal Blooms): physical/biological interactions, climate change , and other current issues”. It was interesting to hear the results of data obtained from chlorophyll samples from Bantry Bay painstakingly analysed back in Dunstaffnage in 1992, and to see how the forecast of HABs is improving. However, despite much better understanding of the processes and huge computational capacity, scientists can still get it wrong, as they did on US East coast. So, plenty more work to do!
Philippe Cury’s keynote lecture was refreshingly optimistic. He analysed the value of scenarios in helping move towards better scientific predictions. Scenarios increase the responsibility of the scientific community towards future generations, because they will help assess future changes in ecosystems over the next fifty years. His presence on the newly-constituted Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IBES), a new mechanism which will strengthen the dialogue between the scientific community and policymakers on biodiversity and ecosystem services, can only be beneficial. His approach marks a departure from a traditionally linear approach to scenarios and adopts Moss’s approach, which is to establish a desired objective for the future, then work on scenarios which will get us there. These will include mitigation and adaptation.
Philippe introduced the idea of scenario laboratories for the use of stakeholders, which he illustrated by running a visual simulation of a fishing area under different fishing pressures. Great idea, but does it really take so much high-tech gadgetry to convince the fishing industry that overfishing leads to the disappearance of fish, and that if some areas are closed to fishing, surprise, the seabed starts recovering and the fish population increases?
Was this conference useful in generating scientific translation work? Maybe, time will tell..... But it was helpful in terms of keeping in touch with the field and being aware of new developments.
IPBES
Le sigle n’a pas encore d’équivalent en français, mais on l’appelle déjà le « Giec de la biodiversité », sur le modèle du Groupe intergouvernemental d’experts sur l’évolution du climat.
Moss, R.H. et al The next generation of scenarios for climate change research and assessment Nature 463, 747-756 (11 February 2010)
No comments:
Post a Comment