Ecosystem-Based Integrated Ocean Management: A Framework for Sustainable Ocean Economy Development

on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in Rio de Janeiro. The goals represent an internationally agreed definition of global sustainability that spans

the environmental, social, and economic spheres and is granular enough to be a useful framework for definitions at finer scales.

Figure 2. The 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Source: United Nations

Ocean managers tend to focus on SDG 14, which has the most direct link with the ocean (Wright et al. 2017). However, in addition to safeguarding eco- system health, a truly sustainable ocean economy is one that reduces poverty and hunger (e.g. by providing food from the ocean and income from jobs related to marine activities), improves health and wellbeing (e.g. by providing opportunities for recreation in clean and healthy coastal and ocean environments), provides educational opportunities, clean energy from marine renewables, ensures equal access to these benefits for both men and women, as well as people from different social backgrounds, etc.: to fully define a sustainable ocean economy, every SDG is relevant. This pre- sents ocean managers with a challenge: if all SDGs are relevant to a sustainable ocean economy, where should the priorities lie? Historically, it was sometimes argued that values in the different spheres of sustainability can be traded off against each other freely, as long as net benefits are maximised (the weak sustainability paradigm, as summarized in Dietz & Neumayer 2007 and Neu- mayer 2003, pp. 1–2). If applied to the SDGs, this would mean regarding them as independent and mutually interchangeable, with gains in any one SDG compensating for losses or lack of progress in any other. However, this would fail to recognize that human societies and economies depend on healthy ecosystems and the ecosystem services they provide. As an absolute minimum, the life sup- port functions of the natural environment must be

regarded as entirely non-substitutable, since their loss makes the creation of a sustainable economy impossible (Dietz & Neumayer 2007). Protecting nature matters in its own right, and also because our wellbeing depends on it. Breach- ing ecosystem boundaries will destabilize natu- ral systems to the point that it will undermine the foundation of social and economic systems. The development of sustainable economies therefore depends on recognizing multiple ways in which human wellbeing is interlinked with ecosystem health, and how the SDGs are linked and depend- ent upon each other (Nilsson et al. 2016, Miola et al. 2019). For example, SDG 14 – the ocean SDG – depends in part on SDG 13 (effective climate action will reduce climate change impacts on the ocean ecosystem), and SDG 6 and SDG 15 (improved san- itation and effective protection of terrestrial habi- tats both reduce pollution of waterways that flow into the ocean). In turn, SDG 14 positively supports every other SDG, including those that fall into the social and economic spheres (Singh et al. 2018). WWF (2020) shows that 38% of all interrelationships between SDGs are positive links between SDG 14 and other goals, with SDG 1 and SDG 2 (no pov- erty and zero hunger) particularly strongly linked to ocean health: human wellbeing is intertwined with a healthy ocean. Instead of visually representing the SDGs as sepa- rate boxes arranged alongside each other as equals (Figure 2), it would therefore arguably be better to

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