Our Introduction

 

Afriseas is an innovative ocean consultancy that works in the African ocean sustainability, governance and conservation space.

 

Burgeoning global human populations and accelerated resource-uses are placing increasing pressures on the planet’s environments and natural resources, including the ocean. Many countries and regions are turning to their ocean space to foster economic growth and resource-use security including livelihood, food and energy security, in what are termed ocean or blue economies that introduce non-linear and interlinked pressures and impacts on the world's oceans. Such resource-uses, pressures and impacts require ocean inclusive and sustainable economic development approaches that advance the production and sharing of opportunities today, and the allocation of opportunities between today and tomorrow.

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While many diverse definitions of ocean sustainability have been advanced, we propose the maximisation and balancing of the stocks and flows of human, produced and non-produced (or natural) capitals of comprehensive ocean wealth as an underpinning framework of inclusive and sustainable economic development. Such development is achieved through inclusive and evidence-based, adaptive ocean governance of human resource-uses and pressures to balance economic production, environmental protection and societal prosperity. In particular, ocean governance strategies need to address the production and consumption pressures of unsustainable extraction, carbon emissions, loss of habitat and system structure, function and productivity, waste and effluent discharge, and translocations (including viral translocations), that result in ocean impacts of biodiversity and ecosystem loss, pollution, the myriad of “climate change” effects, and invasives that drive an ocean polycrisis that goes beyond a “triple planetary crisis”. Importantly, modern ocean inclusive and sustainable development and associated adaptive and evidence-based ocean governance needs to accommodate ocean environmental and asset change, ocean resource-use change and changes in ocean knowledge production advanced by novel technologies.

 

Ocean economic development includes within least or less developed countries (LDCs). Global ocean development has historically been achieved without sustainable and inclusive economic development programmes, so that ocean sustainability is now advanced in an inequitable manner that often disadvantages LDCs. Given transboundary and dynamic global pressures on ocean systems (and associated boundary porosity) there is a critical need for a transformative balance in ocean inclusivity and sustainability programmes.

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AfriSeas focusses on such programmes.

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