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On Saturday March 4, 2023, the President of the Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (IGC) tasked with elaborating an Agreement to protect the biodiversity of the high seas declared, “The ship has reached the shore”. After more than 15 years of discussions and negotiations, consensus on an Agreement to ensure the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity in marine areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ) has finally been reached.

The far-reaching agreement at COP15 in December 2022 which led to the new Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework is the successor of the Aichi targets under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The webinar on 10 March 2023 featured Mr. Basile van Havre, the Co-Chair for the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Open-Ended Working Group tasked with the development of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. The webinar was hosted hosted by the School of the Environment and the Sobey School of Business at Saint Mary’s University (Halifax, Canada) and the Community Conservation Research Network.

The 'Feed the Future - Innovation Lab for Fish' is a USAID supported project based at the Mississippi State University in Starkville, Mississippi. It had invited Stella Williams of Mundus maris as a keynote speaker on 27 February 2023 at day one of its last annual project meeting in New Orleans. Fittingly, the day's key programme topics were gender, youth, and advancing human and institutional capacity development.

This talk by Andrea M. Collins of the University of Waterloo in Canada provided a high-level overview of the various tools and perspectives for undertaking gender-focused analysis in resource sectors such as small-scale fisheries. Drawing from gender studies, feminist political ecology, feminist political economy, and political science, this talk dispelled the idea that gender analysis means only focusing on women. It showed how understanding the many dimensions of gender roles and relations can improve the analysis of resource management and economic activity, expand our understanding of vulnerability and empowerment, and advance policy-relevant outcomes.

This was the first flagship event of the Mission to restore the ocean and waters, a major European initiative to prevent pollution, protect biodiversity and develop sustainable activities in our ocean and waters by 2030. Forum attendees had the opportunity to get some impressions of the first year of implementation of the Mission, showcasing an initial portfolio of projects and actions to achieve the Mission’s objectives. The full day of plenty of short presentations was interrupted by rather long breaks to allow for discussions and networking. Mundus maris shares some impressions.

You can come across them on any walk along the beach, small pieces of torn fishing nets. But they are just the tip of the iceberg. There are probably tens of thousands of tons of ghost nets on the bottom of the Baltic Sea or they got stuck on shipwrecks. These nets not only destroy the sometimes historic wrecks with their weight, but are also a deadly trap for fish, porpoises, seals and birds, which get caught in them and die miserably.

This talk dwells upon different research paradigms such as Hypothesis-oriented, Assessment-oriented, Action-oriented, Systems-oriented, Social adaptive (similar to V2V) frameworks. The motivation behind this talk is to discuss research that goes beyond the conventionally defined domains of science; the relevance of non-expert based knowledge to offer solutions to complex social and environmental problems, and the research that can bring significant impacts on people's behavior by small endeavors.

China not only has the largest fishing fleet in the world, but with 1.4 billion people is also a huge market of people who like to eat fish and seafood. Europe as the foremost import market of such commodities clearly has an interest to develop its relations with China in ways that respect the interests of both sides. The Fisheries Committee of the European Parliament gathered to discuss the role of China in global fisheries in its session on Wednesday 25 January 2023.

Big relief and a lot of excitement - those were the predominent sensations for participants heading for the 2023 edition of the 'love your ocean' platform coordinated by the German Ocean Foundation at the international Boot fair in Düsseldorf, Germany. After a two-year break due to the pandemic Mundus maris was happy to be on board together with Quantitative Aquatics, the scientific non-profit running the global databases FishBase, SeaLifeBase and Aquamaps. We were in good company with other organisations committed to ocean literacy, recovery and protection and contributing to the UN Decade for Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, 2021-2030.

Portus00In the video available to visitors to the Fiumicino Ship Museum next to Rome's international airport, the archaeologist Renato Sebastiani states that without the ancient port of Ostia the greatness of imperial Rome would not have been possible, a metropolis of about one million inhabitants. Certainly a statement that can be shared, but it is only one side of a coin that seems to have many, well more than two. And here we have to open a necessary digression.

 

 

This was the last webinar in the 2022 series of monthly events of the research platform V2V (Vulnerability to Viability) to which Mundus maris is a partner. Dr. Friday Njaya, Director of Fisheries in Malawi, presented the key lessons from the development of Transboundary Fisheries Management (TFM) on Lake Chiuta. The lake is shared between Malawi and Mozambique. Since the mid-1990s, fisheries co-management was introduced on the Malawian side of the lake by establishing Beach Village Committees (BVCs).so as to address any issues through greater participation.