ocean practices for the decade

“Developing global consensus on how methods should interoperate and evolve into best practices is a major challenge on the path to realizing the Ocean Decade’s ambitions.”

The Ocean Practices for the Decade Programme (OceanPractices) supports all ocean stakeholders in securing, equitably sharing, and collectively advancing your methodological heritage. By engaging diverse communities of practice, OceanPractices can transform how science and other stakeholders align their interests/capacities, creating and using practices to promote sustainable human and ocean well-being.

Objectives

The Ocean Practices created a framework of high-level objectives to guide programme actions and define and monitor outcomes. These objectives are:

Enable the development, adoption, and continuous evolution of context-sensitive methodologies and best practices related to ocean research, operations and applications to support the UN Ocean Decade objectives and goals;
Accelerate the co-development and convergence of methodologies across ocean communities into community-accepted, trusted and interoperable best practices and standards;
Sustain a trusted and FAIR- and CARE-compliant system through which the ocean community permanently archives and accesses its methods, standards, guidelines and other methodological content;
Expanding from HLO 3, facilitate the creation of a federated network of complementary and seamlessly interoperable methodology management systems, bringing together UN IGOs, non-UN IGOs, NGOs, regional and global programmes, projects and the private sector; and
Foster community-led capacity development in ocean best practices to enable equitable access to information, technology and knowledge and facilitate more ocean science that is fit for purpose.

Activities

OceanPractices will be implemented through the following activities. Over the Decade, these Activities will be updated in response to changing needs.

consolidating discussions on ocean practices;
expanding the digital infrastructure for methodologies management;
coordination to promote links between scientific methodology and sustainable development;
enable equitable access and worldwide capacity development;
collaboratively develop and implement pilot activities.
support and collaborate with other Ocean Decade Programmes and Projects in implementation of best practices

Current Activities:

OceanPractices Ambassadors: The early career Ocean Practices Ambassadors are representing diverse voices, actively promoting the access and implementation of ocean best practices in the field, thereby raising awareness, building trust, and shaping ocean best practices across the entire ocean value chain. Read more here .

OceanPractices Federated Network: OBPS is not the only aquatic and ocean sciences Methodology Management System (MMS). The establishment of the OceanPractices Federated Network will facilitate a coordinated approach across MMS from individual institutions or enterprises. This will enable MMS that may be siloed and often inaccessible, to interoperate and offer federated searching. Read more here .

OceanPractices Community of Practice: This network is available to all who have an interest to adopt or create and share superior methods for every activity in ocean observing from research to operations to applications. Read more here .

Outcomes

The outcomes currently envisioned are:

A participatory ocean where all ocean stakeholders can discover, understand, and co-develop the next generation of ocean practices with increased equity, accelerating inclusive capacity exchange and development
An oceanwide community of practice where local, regional, and global stores of evolving ocean knowhow and methodology are collectively safeguarded as a shared resource and trust for current and future generations to draw from in the creation of new practices for opportunities and threats we have yet to imagine.
A new commons of practitioner wisdom through which diverse experience across ocean stakeholders are readily available to guide the selection and endorsement of practices for use across regions, operational realities, and value systems of ocean communities in their support of science and sustainable development converge innovative methodologies into endorsement of methods
An ocean of holistic methods where technologies and new, open paradigms of methodology development and communication bring disciplines together in support of holistic methods, realizing transparency and advanced interoperability across disciplines and stakeholders
A future-facing federation of digitized knowhow for technology transfer and capacity development which equips all partners with interoperating digital archives of ocean practice, creating a global network to support the integration of methodologies into the digital ocean ecosystem.

Decade Projects and Actions hosted by OceanPractices

Advocating for humane capture fisheries to support ocean and fisheries sustainability (Region: Global; Lead Institute: Aquatic Life Institute).

Advancing National Best Practices for Marine Monitoring (Region: Australia, Lead Institute: NESP Marine and Coastal Hub)

Community Science for Ocean Observing: Engaging through the use of best practices (Region: Global, Lead Institute: IFREMER)

Contacts

Lead: Dr Rebecca Zitoun, GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel

Co-lead: Aileen Hwai Tan, Universiti Sains, Malaysia

decade@oceanbestpractices.org

OceanPractices (COP) on the Stakeholder Network:
https://forum.oceandecade.org/topics/30867/home