2.3.2.2 Triage sequence 1.2: What are the most important policy issues in relation to marine ecosystem services in the area?

TRIAGE SEQUENCE 1
Preliminary delimitation of the scope of the ecosystem services assessment in relation to its general aims

Question 2
What are the most important policy issues in relation to marine ecosystem services in the area?

The policy issue may be linked to the impacts of particular activities, the claims of certain stakeholders or the possible change in collective rules.

It is necessary to be precise when defining the policy issue, and to establish a hierarchy when several policy issues are of interest.

Where several options exist, a process for prioritising the policy issues can be implemented. For instance it is possible to ask stakeholders to give a score (high, moderate, low) to the different issues and then deliberate for gathering a selection of the more relevant issues.

This question is also important as a preliminary step of a scenario building process. The partnership has to identify the common focus (management question, issues, topic).

The common focus may be a:

• Broad scale approach with a set of local issues or a;
• Management question on a habitat (e.g. kelp forest), an ecological function (e.g. primary production), or an ecosystem services (e.g. recreational activities)

Different tools can be used in order to reach this objective:
Interviews
Brainstorming

Example

Example of the implementation of question 2 results, in 3 different sites in France (VALMER project, 2013). The objectives have been defined during workshops involving ecosystem services experts and site managers.

Once the aim of the marine ecosystem services was identified and structured into a set of main, secondary and complementary purposes (question 1), study site teams were asked to formulate the policy issues which are related to the considered ecosystem services in their area.

Not surprisingly, the policy issues in the Parc Naturel Marin d’Iroise and the Parc Naturel Régional du Golfe du Morbihan study sites focused on the ecological and social concerns related to kelp habitats and seagrass beds respectively, while the Golfe Normand-Breton study site identified a wide range of policy issues, from the protection of marine biodiversity to the development of new activities and the consequences of population growth on ecosystem services (table above).

It was not possible to rank these ecological and social concerns at this stage, because the study site teams felt it was not qualified to conduct such an appraisal.

However, a hierarchy of policy issues is to be provided when ecological and social concerns are numerous and diverse. This means that the Golfe Normand-Breton is a study site where policy issues need to be selected, preferably through stakeholder consultation.

For all sites, the next important step was to link ecological and social concerns with the various categories of services provided by the considered marine ecosystem (what is to be done through question 3 of the sequence 1 of the triage process).