Organized by the Future Ocean Alliance & Earth System Governance Project and the Luso-American Foundation (FLAD)

Threats to marine systems, ranging from problems affecting specific areas like overfishing, intensification of human activities on offshore areas and marine pollution to global problems like climate change and ocean acidification have been on the rise.

The policy community has launched initiatives to address ocean issues, including the UN Blueprint for Ocean and Coastal Sustainability, the Global Partnership for Oceans, and the Oceans Compact. The science community has launched a concerted effort to deal with large scale environmental issues through a concentrated effort known as Future Earth. This is a growing global network of individuals, researchers of natural and social sciences, administrators, and policy-makers promoting a vision of sustainable knowledge to bridge the gap between science and policy on oceans.

Missing from most efforts to address these problems is a productive partnership between policy makers, administrators, and scientists needed to move these initiatives from ideas on paper to effective measures in practice. It is necessary for an effective mechanism to coordinate these initiatives through joint efforts to formulate critical questions in need of systematic investigation and to translate the results of research into practical policy recommendations.

The Future Ocean Alliance is a growing global network of individuals, researchers of natural and social sciences, administrators, and policy-makers promoting a vision of sustainable knowledge to bridge the gap between science and policy on oceans.

This seminar brings together key individuals from the international research arena, administrators, and policy makers that currently are addressing challenges of coordination between science towards problem solving, and that are developing a common vision of sustainable knowledge to promote the development of a research agenda for oceans within the vision of the Future Earth initiative.

Speakers:

• Charles Buchanan, Member of the Executive Council, Luso-American Foundation-FLAD
• Joao Fonseca Ribeiro, Directorate General for Maritime Policy-DGPM, Portugal
• Peter Fox, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA, t.b.c.
• Marion Glaser, Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone Program-LOICZ and the Leibniz Center For Tropical Marine Ecology-ZMT, Germany
• Robin Mahon, Transboundary Water Assessment Programme- TWAP and University of West Indies, Barbados
• Manuel Pinto de Abreu, Portuguese Secretary of State of the Sea
• Julien Rochette, Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations- IDDRI, France
• Isabel Torres de Noronha, Future Ocean Alliance-FOA, Portugal
• Luis Valdés, Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission-IOC of UNESCO, France
• David Vousden, Agulhas and Somali Currents LMEs-ASCLME, South Africa
• Oran R. Young, University of California, Earth System Governance Project, and Future Ocean Alliance-FOA, USA
• Ruben Zondervan, Earth System Governance Project, Lund University, and FOA, Sweden

Information and coordination: itnoronha@gmail.com

Location: FLAD Auditorium www.flad.pt, Rua Sacramento à Lapa, 21. 1249-090 Lisbon, Portugal