2025/03/21 by Juliette Jacquemont, Tanya Brodie-Rudolph, Leopoldo Cavaleri Gerhardinger +3 · 2 voices
Environmental Science · #Coastal and Marine Management #Environmental and Social Impact Assessments #Sustainability and Climate Change Governance
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s44183-025-00108-7
Ambitious evidence-based policies are urgently needed to redirect mankind’s trajectory towards ocean sustainability. While global environmental assessments (GEAs) synthesizing ocean knowledge are multiplying, we must ensure that their processes and outputs are conducive to social legitimacy, scientific credibility, and meet decision-makers’ needs. Here, we identify best practices for GEAs to achieve legitimacy, credibility, and salience and develop a framework to evaluate their levels of implementation. We apply this framework to review the processes and outputs of 12 influential reports at the ocean science-policy interface. Credibility best practices were well implemented in GEAs but significant opportunities remain to strengthen legitimacy and salience best practices, notably by increasing stakeholder engagement, diversifying knowledge systems represented, and featuring actionable knowledge for decision-makers. We formulate four recommendations to strengthen the GEA seascape: elevating co-production practices, bridging scales through multi-level approaches, increasing transparency in knowledge choices and gaps, and coordinating assessment processes.