So, Ken, this has been quite a journey over the past few weeks with the MOOC.

And one of the things that I found quite interesting

was the fact that the whole LME concept is not just focused on single regions,

it's actually covering the whole globe.

And that opens up all sorts of possibilities for doing comparative studies

across all of these LMEs and actually

enriching the science and the potential for management.

I'd say, very important point,

Coleen, that you bring forward,

and that is, it's impossible to take a whole marine ecosystem,

put it in an aquarium and study it.

You can't do that. The standard scientific methodology.

So, we need to be creative and the creativity here is in the comparative approach,

where time series of the assessment of productivity,

fish fisheries, pollution, ecosystem health,

even socioeconomic and governance,

important considerations from one large marine ecosystem to another.

And that has produced a good number of

very thoughtful publications in sharing of the results here.

And there are two areas worth mentioning.

One is in regard to eutrophication,

with our now projections to the year 2030 of the amount of

dissolved inorganic nitrogen to expect in the world's large marine ecosystem.

And that's a red flag identifying

an issue common to all the LMEs that needs attention and mitigation.

And the other is climate change.

Climate change is affecting all the large marine ecosystems.

And there's evidence in 61 of

the large marine ecosystems that climate is

warming at an accelerating rate over the past two decades.

And that warning signal is having

an effect already on the world's large marine ecosystem.

And in fact, the world's oceans.

And the signal that we're measuring now suggests that by the year 2060,

the amount of global primary production is likely to decline due to

the superheated waters on the surface over the cooler waters on the subsurface

inhibiting the mixture on

some seasonal or annual cycle of nutrients from the bottom to the surface waters,

and that will tend to reduce the primary production,

and that will tend to have a negative impact on the fish.

Yeah, it's going to feed all the way through to the fish stocks.

And that's especially important in

the circum-global belt between 30 degrees north and 30 degrees south.

And unfortunately, that's the belt that can have a significant impact and has

the lesser amount of resource readily available to

mitigate the issues in that fish protein for food security,

for protein intake, is so very important

in the countries in this tropical-subtropical belt.

And they need to be alert to these projections and take

some precautionary actions as soon as they

can based on this mounting evidence of global climate change.

And the beneficiaries turn out to be those countries to

the north where fish are migrating into large marine ecosystems.

And the growing period in the warmer months of the year is extended.

And as a result, production,

especially fish production, is increasing to the point where,

in the Bering Sea up north off the coast of Russia and Norway,

there are huge catches of codfish at a time when we

don't see that sort of commensurate increases,

but rather, we see somewhat of a suggestion of

a decline in some of the tropical-subtropical LME.

And you're moving in that description

into some of the human dimensions aspects of the LMEs,

and something that struck me also when we were doing the readings and going through

some of the commentary from the other experts in the LMEs,

the LME family, was

almost the humanizing parts of the LME process because often, in the readings,

people would talk about trust being

generated because they were working in this trans-boundary way,

and the needs to have teams of people working together.

So, there's almost another aspect that's come through from having

this large global approach to examining marine ecosystems,

which is developing trust and the ability of people to work together.

And a little bit of transferring some of the methods from different cultures,

and changing culture in order to address some of the issues,

and I found that quite interesting.

It was something I hadn't considered before,

but it came through quite strongly in the MOOC when I was learning with the participants.

What's important about that observation,

and I'm very pleased you brought it forward,

is that the very nature of countries willing to accept a ecologically-defined boundary

rather than a political boundary that's part of

our natural planetary system where there are shared resources,

and the boundary is based on

ecological criteria of the shape of

the bottom and the hydrography of the water in that basin,

and the amount of productivity it will generate,

and the nature of the transfer of energy from one level to another,

the willingness to accept the idea from

science that these are shared resources, and therefore,

it's to the benefit of the people in the region and of the countries to work together,

and to see this happen at administerial level,

at the highest levels of government,

and particularly, in the developing parts of the world.

It's very, very encouraging to have countries work together voluntarily

and sort of get in the same rowboat and row in

the same direction at the same time, that's quite remarkable.

And then to have a GEF come along,

recognize that this is a paradigm shift that's very good for the world,

and provide financial assistance so that it can

continue and even expand, that's most encouraging.

As I move around the world and I visited most of the large marine ecosystems,

I see this cadre of people anxious and willing and with the ability to work together.

One of the exciting things about the course itself is

it's opening the concept and the approach

up to thousands more as they take

the course and learn about the positive things going on in the world.

And that was also an aspect that came home to me and I hadn't fully appreciated,

as a natural scientist who isn't very involved in policy and politics,

was the really positive move on a global scale that the UN involvement has brought to

ecosystem-based management and how important it has been to have

that top-down support for

the bottom-up activities of the people who are concerned about the marine environment.

Yes. And I think,

that's extremely important because it's a game changer.

And a game changer is when an event comes

along that changes how we do things on a global basis.

And the creation of the GEF after UNCED in 1992,

that was a game changer because it was vested with the amount of

funding in a trust fund commensurate with the issues that needed to be attacked.

So usually, when we associate the word billions,

and the UN would probably associate it with a disaster or a war,

some horrifying kind of thing.

In this case, if we had the investment and

the catalytic dimensions of the financial support to economically developing nations,

it's absolutely unprecedented at $6 billion.

And the future is looking very good in

that the GEF announced the top 21 in Paris in 2015,

that LMEs are their cornerstone project.

And that they are, in fact,

the largest funder of environmental assessment and management practices in the world.

And here, we have them both moving in the same direction at the same time,

bringing the countries along and

encouraging this bottom-up approach that you've mentioned.

So I think, there's every reason for us to be optimistic.

We have seven billion of us inhabiting the globe just now.

Prognosis for 9 billion by 2050.

As our populations expand, our needs expand,

the demands on goods and services in these LMEs will expand.

The good news is,

we're being prepared. We are prepared.

We're committed at the highest levels,

the ministerial levels, for most of the populations in the world,

to at least improve conditions and provide

the scientific means and the financial means to move the world forward.

And that's really why we developed the MOOC,

so that we had something concrete for people to use,

to take into the future.

It's a cutting edge MOOC.

It's one in which the participants are right,

where change is taking place,

and the good news is,

it's all positive change.

Talking to Dr Sherman about LMEs making a difference

Large Marine Ecosystems: Assessment and Management

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