Making the UN Ocean Decade work? The potential for, and challenges of, transdisciplinary research and real-world laboratories for building towards ocean solutions

[摘要] 1. Due to the strong interconnectedness between the ocean and our societiesworldwide, improved ocean governance is essential for sustainable development in the context of the UN Ocean Decade. However, a multitude of differentperspectives—ecological, societal, political, economic—and relations betweenthese have to be understood and taken into consideration to foster transformative pathways towards marine sustainability.2. A core challenge that we are facing is that the ‘right’ response to complex societal issues cannot be known beforehand as abilities to predict complex systemsare limited. Consequently, societal transformation is necessarily a journey towards the unknown and therefore requires experimental approaches that mustenable the involvement of everyone with stakes in the future of our marine environment and its resources.3. A promising transdisciplinary research method that fulfils both criteria—beingparticipatory and experimental—are real-world laboratories. Here, we discusshow real-world labs can serve as an operational framework in the context of theOcean Decade by facilitating and guiding successful knowledge exchange at theinterface of science and society. The core element of real-world labs is transdisciplinary experimentation to jointly develop potential strategies leading to targeted real-world interventions, essential for achieving the proposed ‘DecadeOutcomes’.4. The authors specifically illustrate how deploying the concept of real-world labscan be advantageous when having to deal with multiple, overlapping challengesin the context of ocean governance and the blue economy.5. Altogether, we offer a first major contribution to synthesizing knowledge onthe potentials of marine real-world labs, considering how they act as a way ofexploring options for sustainable ocean futures. Indeed, in the marine context,real-world labs are still under-explored but are a tangible way for addressing thesocietal challenges of working towards sustainability transformations over thecoming UN Ocean Decade and beyond.

[学科分类] 护理学

[关键词] blue economy;living labs;marine conservation and biodiversity;marine socio-ecological systems;ocean governance;ocean sustainability;SDG 14;societal challenges