Scientific scenarios integrating social and ecological phenomena are needed to achieve sustainable exploitation of marine ecosystems and to develop clear political strategies toward sustainability. This is a one week participatory workshop focusing on the development of scenarios for the sustainability of global socio-ecological oceanic systems including the interactive effects of climate change, biodiversity and ecosystems, economic drivers of fisheries and markets, governance strategies for open ocean fisheries, and political, legal and institutional contexts. The workshop is designed to contribute to IPBES and IPCC endeavours while ensuring political relevance and social usefulness for major stakeholders of oceanic systems. The present initiative would provide such organisations with relevant scenarios of the impact of climate change and alternative governance strategies on oceanic socio-ecosystems and the services they provide to societies.
It is expected that the scenarios developed during the workshop will serve as tools to help factor long-term dynamics into decision making. The main output of the workshop will be a set of reference scenarios for oceanic ecosystems and fisheries including corresponding governance strategies, management measures, and legal and institutional evolutions. The scenarios developed during the workshop will be used in simulations with coupled numerical models. These will be made available to the scientific community through a set of peer review articles in a special issue of a journal.