9-12, July 2025. Bodø, Norway.
Hosted by Nord University in the context of the MPA Europe Project, the Conference was an encounter of MSP and MPAs, marine planning and conservation. It brought together actors of academia, governments and policy, industries and organisations, to discuss about latest trends and attitudes towards ocean conservation. Stakeholders were central in the debate and contribution to design planning and conservation solutions, starting from evaluating science data and knowledge.
My contribution to the Conference was a poster presented with a review of European Horizon and Interreg projects about MSP and MPAs, between 2021 and 2024, to see how they play and participate to ocean planning and conservation, as well as to bring biodiversity value and ecosystem- and climate knowledge to socio-economic systems.
The takeaways from the Conference were: the central role of public and private participation to planning and ocean conservation, as promoted by Agenda21 and Aalborg Charter. Science observation and modelling data and knowledge as grounds to discuss the planning agreements, and to monitor their effectiveness and implementation through qualitative and quantitative metrics and indexes. Policy and industries currently deal with uncertainty of risks from biodiversity, climate and pollution at sea, therefore it remains very challenging to establish and scale socio-economic investments into value chains. The opportunities are in upstreaming biodiversity values that will pursue economic viability of ocean conservation and associated social activities.
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