Sierra Leone - State of the Marine Environment 2015

Measuring the State of the Oceans and Coasts:

Guidelines for the Production of State of Marine Environment Assessments and Reports Based on Expert Elicitation

A background paper by GRID-Arendal January 2015

1. Background It is fundamental to marine environmental management that states have the capacity to assess and monitor the condition and trend of coastal and marine ecosystems within their jurisdiction. Undertaking integrated assessments can be expensive and time consuming, but sound information is critical to understand the State Of the Marine Environment (SOME) to underpin decision-making and achieve or maintain ocean health. Most importantly, large-scale integrated assessments must not be overly biased by information that is limited only to places or issues that are well studied, since this might result in outcomes that are not balanced or properly represent conditions across the whole of the area assessed. Further, SOME assessments are a critical data source used by global assessments like the UN World Ocean Assessment (www.worldoceanassessment.org), or large regional assessments like the ones produced under the umbrella of UNEP’s Regional Seas Programme. In order to support the production of the first global ocean assessment a series of regional workshops have been conducted over the last 2 years to identify relevant assessments, regional experts and capacity gaps. At the workshops for the SE Asian Seas (Sanya City, China), the Caribbean (Miami, USA), Western Indian Ocean (Maputo, Mozambique), the South Atlantic (Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire) and recently the Eastern Indian Ocean (Chennai, India), experts from developing states have articulated that, while there is no scarcity of marine environmental experts, the capability to undertake SOME assessments and reports is a major gap due to both the lack of systematic monitoring data and proficiency in environmental reporting. With the intention of exploring options to bridge this gap, regional and national pilot capacity-building workshops have been held in Bangkok, Thailand, Sept. 2012 (Ward, 2012; Feary et al., 2014); Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, Oct. 2013; and in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Feb. 2014. The purpose of the workshops was threefold: i) to expose national or

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