Bruno Meirelles de Oliveira, AZTI Marine Research.
Bruno Meirelles de Oliveira presenting at this year's PECS3 meeting in Montreal, Canada.
The necessity of building a sustainable relationship with the ocean requires both adaptations of the current practices and a bold attitude to face the challenges of future scenarios. As a great part of the current relations with the ocean will require not only incremental but radical changes to be conducive to sustainable futures, understanding where and how these changes will be necessary is crucial and timely.
To tackle these challenges in the coastal realm, Marine SABRES presented its systemic approach to Social-Ecological Systems (SES) in the “PECS3 – Pathways to Sustainability: Social-ecological resilience and transformation across multiple scales” meeting last week in Montreal, Canada. From 12-16 of August 2024, the foremost thinkers and advocates of SES Transformations shared practices, ideas, and research projects discussing how to create transformative agendas for each place-based research, towards facing the challenges that the Anthropocene imposes. Marine SABRES was there, represented by Bruno Meirelles de Oliveira, a researcher at the AZTI Marine Research, under the supervision of Angel Borja.
On behalf of all the authors, Bruno had the opportunity to present the work done to create the models that reveal the systemic view of each Demonstration Area of Marine SABRES (namely Tuscan archipelago, Macaronesia, and the Arctic), and the causal pathways that can be navigated, to lead these areas towards a sustainable and resilient future, in both Shared Socioeconomic Pathways considered in the project (SSP1 and SSP2).
According to Bruno: “PECS is the acronym of Program on Ecosystem Change and Society” an ad hoc group created after the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment publication (2005) supported at that time by the ICSU (International Science Council) and by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organizations). Nowadays PECS is a core Future Earth project and represents the most relevant international arena to discuss Social-Ecological Systems. The main global research groups, and the founders of the SES field were present.”
The sessions that were held during the week were focused on facing the current place-based issues from many interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches, always holding the plurality of perspectives and participation as a central value of the field. The topics ranged from Mapping Transitions, how to integrate Equity, Diversity, and Justice into the SES research, passing for issues such as how to deal with Multiscale Governance, all the way to Future Studies, Urban Realm, and many others. All of these sections were integrated with a set of field trips to the beautiful parks of Montreal.
“There is momentum in the field to promote a deeper dialogue with the societies regarding integrated and plural understandings of human-nature relationship that are conducive to a sustainable future”, said Bruno. As these topics are aligned with the objectives of Marine SABRES, the project has a promising future where the science and experience built on it will guide a resilient and sustainable future.
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