In a speech at a Side-Event to the United Nations Oceans Conference in June 2017, Karmeau Vella, the European Commissioner for the Environment, Marine Affairs and Fisheries, posed the question: ‘[w]hy do we need an ecosystem approach?’ His answer was simple: ‘[b]ecause our future depends increasingly on our capacity to manage the accumulation of human activities; our capacity to take account of all the ways the oceans are used and their impacts; our capacity to ensure that the health of the oceans, their productivity and self-repairing capacity is not undermined’. In Vella’s opinion it is now ‘impossible to look into conservation and sustainable use of the oceans without taking an ecosystem approach to ocean management’.1 In short, the ecosystem approach to oceans management has come of age.
But what, exactly, is the ecosystem approach and how can it be implemented to ensure that ocean ecosystems, resources and space are not exploited beyond their natural limits? Where already over-exploited, as in the case of overfishing or habitat destruction, how can the ecosystem approach be implemented to restore ecosystem health? Moreover, how can the ecosystem approach be implemented to conserve marine biodiversity, to sustain goods and environmental services, to provide social and economic benefits for food security and to sustain livelihoods?
It was a desire to explore these questions and to look for good examples of the bridging or integration of the forces and logics that govern ecosystems and the legal and administrative systems by which they are managed that gave rise to this book. More precisely, the origins of this book lay in a conference held at the Department of Law in the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg in November 2016 during which the authors and other conference participants discussed the issues focusing on the following themes: the conceptualization of the ecosystem approach in law; the relationship between the ecosystem approach as a concept of law and ecosystems as understood by natural science; the ecosystem approach and adaptive management; the ecosystem approach and ecosystem services; multilevel interactions in legal and natural systems; sea-land interactions; the relationship between maps/mapping processes and legal and administrative measures; and participation and dispute management/resolution pertaining to marine resources. Presentations related to both international and EU law as well as domestic law and planning processes. The chapters in this book represent the outcome of that conference.
As in any project of this nature, many thanks are due. First and foremost, we offer our thanks to the Department of Law at the University of Gothenburg, which is where this project and the collaboration between the editors first took root, Professor Rayfuse having been appointed as a Visiting Professor at the Department for 2014–2017. While it is always invidious to mention a few names only, we would like to thank all those who enabled, through their work and commitment or through their financial contributions, Professor Rayfuse’s appointment as well as the establishment of a Chair and an associated well-endowed research environment in Ocean Governance Law at Gothenburg University, thereby making this project as well as many others possible.
We are grateful to Henrik Jansson for his tireless editorial assistance in preparing the draft manuscript. We similarly thank Brill Publishing for its support for this volume and for the helpfulness of its staff, particularly Marie Sheldon and Johanna Lee. Of course, this book would never have been possible without the commitment and hard work of the authors and so our final and deepest thanks go to each of them for their original and thought-provoking contributions.
Co-organized together with the United Nations Environment Programme, the UNEP/MAP, the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean. See <https://ec.europa.eu/commission/commissioners/2014-2019/vella/announcements/un-ocean-conference-ecosystem-approach-regional-level-contributing-implementation-sdg-14_en>.