Authors: Benjamin S. Halpern…,

An Index to Assess the health and benefits of the global ocean

Georges Laguerre

INTRODUCTION

• The Ocean plays a critical role supporting human in: providing food, livelihoods and recreational opportunities to regulating the global climate,

•Anthropogenic impact: such as overfishing, coastal development and pollution have altered marine ecosystems and eroded their capacity to provide benefits now and in the future.

•Yet people benefit directly or indirectly from these activities by extracting food , visiting coastal areas, making a living, or continuing old traditions .

Aim

• To create an index to measure and monitor the health of coupled human-ocean systems.

Significance of the study

Just as traders use various stock indices to monitor the global economy,

micro-analyzing each blip, a team of nearly 50 scientists from many

disciplines is designing an analogous tool to track the health of the

world’s oceans and the implications for human well-being. (Dr. Halpern)

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com

Methods

• To realize the study they create an index method.

I: Index Scoreα: Goal specific weightIi: Average value of present and likely future status for each goal.

Conceptual framework for calculating the index

Results

Map of index and

individual goal scores per country

conclusion

• The index score 0-100

• The index global score is 60

• 5% of the countries >70

• 32% scores <50

Discussion

• Do you really think that the index scores are correlated with the human development index?

• If more goals were considered how do you think the index scores would be affected?

THANK YOU