Project

The Oceans Past Platform Action aims to measure and understand the significance and value to European societies of living marine resource extraction and production to help shape the future of coasts and oceans. The Integrative Platform will lower the barriers between human, social and natural sciences; multiply the learning capacity of research environments; and enable knowledge transfer and co-production among researchers and other societal factors, specifically by integrating historical findings of scale and intensity of resource use into management and policy frameworks.

The oceans offer rich resources for feeding a hungry world. However, the sea is an alien space in a sense that the land is not. Fishing requires skills that must be learned, it presupposes culinary preferences, technical ability, knowledge of target species, and a backdrop of material and intangible culture. The Action asks when, how and with what socio-economic, political, cultural and ecological implications humans have impacted marine life, primarily in European seas in the last two millennia.

The Action calls on historians, archaeologists and social scientists as well as colleagues from the marine sciences to engage in dialogue and collaboration with ocean and coastal managers. The Action will develop historical descriptors and indicators for marine and coastal management.

The Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) coordinates the European funded COST Action OceanGov (Ocean Governance for Sustainability – Challenges, Options and the Role of Science), chaired by Anna-Katharina Hornidge.

During the 4-year term of the project, ZMT brings together scientists, policy-makers and civil society representatives from 29 COST Member States to create and coordinate a research network for inter- and transdisciplinary research on ocean governance in the EU.

Thematically the network concentrates on the following six governance challenges:
Land-Sea Interactions
Area-Based Management
Seabed Resource Management
Nutrition Security and Food Systems
Ocean, Climate Change, and Acidification
Fisheries Governance

Within these six fields existing scientific research on different scale levels, regions and sustainability challenges is systematical being brought together and prepared in the form of integrated advice on governance tools and mechanisms to improve ocean related decision-making.