Evaluating future scenarios for the global ocean

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The ocean is a global social-ecological system whose ecological, socioeconomic and institutional settings show rapid change due to Global Environmental Change (GEC). GEC direct drivers impact biophysical and ecological properties of the ocean and affect many levels of biological organization, from genes to species, populations, communities and ecological interactions. They can also strongly influence species distribution and biogeography. Importantly, indirect drivers such as demography or governance systems also strongly impact marine biodiversity and ecosystem services. The research program is to produce integrated assessments of future marine biodiversity and ecosystem service changes based on a global ecosystem modelling complex. Quantifying future trends of marine productivity is critical to inform ongoing climate-change and biodiversity assessments and guide feasible pathways towards achieving key policy objectives. Therefore, to predict the future of marine biodiversity, ecosystem services delivery and use patterns, we need an integrated view of the ocean as a social-ecological system, encompassing the dynamics of commercial and non-commercial species and their interactions, the dynamics of resource users and their interactions, and how those are affected by changing environmental conditions and management interventions. This implies a progress towards modelling approaches for predictions of future scenarios, which are essential to understand the functioning of the Earth and the Ocean, and the impacts that humans may pose. The proposed program relies on a technically complex approach, combined with interdisciplinary work. Integration of multiple datasets is at the global level, but the analysis will retain information by country and region to capture and analyse regional dynamics of ecosystem functioning and drivers. The analysis will include a vast array of species, considering species traits and interactions, ecosystem structure and functioning, and a variety of human activities and socio-economic values. This will allow us to consider multiple dimensions of biodiversity and ecosystem services (provisioning, regulating and cultural). The work will couple socio-economics with biodiversity dynamics, and contribute to a new generation of models. The program will substantially contribute to predict and suggest adaptive pathways to the impact of global change in marine social-ecological systems, and the work will through its active role in IPCC Model Intercomparison Projects contribute to basic research as well as international assessments of the impact. The program will inform our ability to achieve sustainable use of ecosystem services with a global-scale evaluation of how alternative management measures can be used for mitigation of climate change impacts. This will contribute to the identification of a "safe operational space" to ensure sustainability of ecosystem services under different climate change futures.