Researchers and local representatives from across the world will gather virtually this week to discuss some of the major challenges facing coastal communities.
The third GCRF Blue Communities Annual Meeting had been due to take place in Hoi An, Vietnam, but had to be cancelled as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Instead, partners in the UK and Southeast Asia will be meeting online to discuss the various aspects of policy, planning and management required to support sustainable marine ecosystems.
The annual meeting - with an adapted agenda of talks, workshops and debates - will take place from July 15-22 and is being hosted by the University of Plymouth, from which Professor Mel Austen of the School of Biological and Marine Sciences leads the Blue Communities programme.
It will be attended by up to 100 people and include presentations by academics at the University and the nine project partners, including Plymouth Marine Laboratory.
This will also be the first annual meeting to feature stakeholders in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, where the programme's research projects are taking place, and the schedule has been adapted accordingly to take account of time differences with Southeast Asia.
Blue Communities is a four-year programme launched in 2017 with £6.7 million of funding from UK Research and Innovation's Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF).
It seeks to create new ways of helping coastal communities in Southeast Asia to maintain and enhance their marine-based ecosystems, with an emphasis on improving health, wellbeing, and economic and food sustainability.
Twelve underpinning and interrelated research projects are underway and, in conjunction with coastal community stakeholders, are helping to provide an understanding of the impacts and opportunities of overfishing/sustainable fishing, rising tourism, renewable energy, climate change, coastal area management, rising populations, economic improvement and transport.
A key emphasis of the programme is to build research capability that will support and underpin stakeholders and their decisions on marine spatial planning for the sustainable management of marine ecosystems.
All projects across the region will share data and findings, and it is hoped they will also be able to roll out the projects to other communities that suffer from similar challenges.
Marine Institute
Representing 3000 staff, researchers and students, the University of Plymouth's Marine Institute is the first and largest such institute in the UK.
We provide the external portal to our extensive pool of world-leading experts and state-of-the-art facilities, enabling us to understand the relationship between the way we live, the seas that surround us and the development of sustainable policy solutions.
