Managing estuarine and marine areas to protect their natural functioning while delivering societal benefits

Abstract:

The natural and social sciences are needed to achieve the one big idea in estuarine and marine management. Ecosystem services start from the natural ecosystem structure and functioning and cover the regulating, provisioning, supporting and cultural aspects. Societal benefits can be gathered from ecosystem services only after investing time, energy, finance and skills. Estuaries and coasts have long been affected by hazards and risks causing degradation which then needs to be restored or compensated. A hazard and risk typology is used to show pressures which emanate from inside and outside the managed system. This involves fulfilling the so-called 10-tenets which inter alia includes a plethora of environmental legislation and many statutory organisations as well as economic constraints. Global examples of successes and failures including ecoengineering and ecohydrology principles are shown.

About Mike Elliott:

Mike Elliott is the Professor of Estuarine and Coastal Sciences at the University of Hull, UK. He is a marine biologist with wide experience and interests including estuarine and marine ecology, policy, governance and management. He has published widely and has advised on many environmental matters for academia, industry, government and statutory bodies worldwide. He is a past-President of the international Estuarine & Coastal Sciences Association (ECSA) and is a Co-Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Estuarine, Coastal & Shelf Science; he has Adjunct Professor and Research positions at universities in Europe, Asia and Africa. Professor Elliott is also a member of several national and international committees linking marine science to policy.

Panel discussion with Prof. Dr. Karsten Reise:

Karsten Reise is a Professor emeritus at the University of Kiel who led the Wadden Sea Station Sylt of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, for a long time. He is a biologist and an engaged environmentalist who almost spent his lifetime in science on studying and protecting the Wadden Sea and he contributed significantly to the efforts of making it a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Professor Karsten Reise is currently studying the response of coastal seas to invasive species and providing concepts for the adaptation to and mitigation of outcomes of sea level rise of low-lying northern Germany.