Evaluating the health of the oceans and how people benefit from them are two monumental tasks. Now, an international team of scientists is daring to synthesize those findings into a single number they call the Ocean Health Index.
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Until now, there was no common metric for communicating the current status of ocean health or for marking progress toward a goal. Indeed, better communication is one of the major motivations behind the Ocean Health Index, or OHI, says marine ecologist Ben Halpern, who is the project’s lead scientist and director of the Center for Marine Assessment and Planning at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
You can think of the OHI as the GDP of the ocean, Halpern explains. The concept of gross domestic product was not invented until just over 75 years ago. Before then, there was no simple way to track how well a nation’s economy and its people were doing. Now GDP is cited all the time.
Perhaps the same will be true of OHI when the 60-scientist team publishes its final assessments early next year. The best nitty-gritty details for driving ocean policy are the individual OHIs being derived for specific countries and regions, Halpern told Discovery News.
“We are providing a global number, but that is really more for global awareness,” he says. “If it motivates countries to change their behavior for the sake of the world ocean, that would be awesome.”
To fully embrace the OHIs, many people may have to adjust their definition of a “healthy” ocean. Indeed, how to define “healthy” has been the most controversial aspect of the project so far, Halpern says. In the installment of a Miller-McCune series on the topic, posted yesterday, he and his colleagues firmly assert that “oceans are peopled too!" In their August installment, they explained it this way:
We are not defining healthy as pristine, free from the influence of people. An index of ‘pristineness’ would have no relevance to policy, since ocean policy is made for the people, by the people. The ocean and people are inextricably linked, from sustenance to jobs to spiritual connections; people use, influence, or value every corner of the world’s oceans.
Still, everyone knows the ocean is really suffering in many parts of the world, and that its continuing ability to deliver vital benefits to people depends on its resilience to a barrage of health threats.
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The three founding partners of the Ocean Health Index— Conservation International, National Geographic and the New England Aquarium—are clearly on board with Halpern’s philosophy. Appropriately, though, the project description on the Conservation International web site addresses the threats to ocean health first and foremost:
Using indicators that measure the intensity of the most urgent ocean stressors, including climate change, ocean acidification, overfishing, habitat degradation, invasive species, loss of biodiversity, pollution and eutrophication, the Ocean Health Index will measure the status and trends of ocean health and its components. The index will also assess trends in remedial actions taken to conserve marine habitats. Finally, the index will relate trends in ocean health to benefits provided to people and human well-being.
Halpern readily acknowledges the tension between human reliance on ocean resources and our desire to protect them. And he argues that the Ocean Health Index is exactly what the world needs to help us face that tension head on.
Synthesizing these factors into a single index “forces us to make explicit the relative importance of the different components that we are evaluating,” he wrote in the October installment of the Miller-McCune series, and “it makes explicit and quantitative the trade-offs that occur among goals.”
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Facing the future won't be easy. Here is the bottom line, from Halpern's latest story:
We want bountiful seafood, thriving coastal communities, and gorgeous places to explore. But reaping these benefits involves tough choices. One of science’s roles is to inform decision-makers and the public about the likely consequences of decisions and remind us, whether we like it or not, that Earth's resources are not infinite.
It is human nature to assume we can have it all. Reality, particularly with an eye toward a sustainable future, tells us that we can’t, and that tough choices lie ahead. The Ocean Health Index will help us confront those choices with open eyes.
IMAGES:
Clownfish. (Wikimedia Commons)
Ben Halpern. (Courtesy CMAP)
Tags: Biodiversity, Climate Change, Conservation, Fish, Food
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