2015 GLOBAL SCORES THE OCEAN HEALTH INDEX TEAM TABLE OF CONTENTS Conservation International Introduction to Ocean Health Index ............................................................................................................. 1 Results for 2015 ........................................................................................................................................... 3 Country & Territory Scores ........................................................................................................................... 9 Appreciations ............................................................................................................................................. 23 Citation ...................................................................................................................................................... 23 UC Santa Barbara, National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis INTRODUCTION TO THE OCEAN HEALTH INDEX Important note: Scores in this report differ from scores originally posted on the Ocean Health Index website, www.oceanhealthindex.org and shown in previous reports. Each year the Index improves methods and data where possible. Some improvements change scores and rankings. When such changes occur, all earlier scores are recalculated using the new methods so that any differences in scores between years is due to changes in the conditions evaluated, not to changes in methods. This permits year-to-year comparison between all global-level Index results. Only the scores most recently posted at www.oceanhealthindex.org should be compared, as scores posted or published in earlier years will have changed. What is the Ocean Health Index? The Ocean Health Index is the first assessment tool that scientifically compares and combines key elements from all dimensions of the ocean’s health – biological, physical, economic and social—to measure how sustainably people are using the ocean. What is ‘ocean health’? The Ocean Health Index uses this definition: ‘A healthy ocean sustainably delivers a range of benefits to people now and in the Future.’ How does the Index work? It tracks a portfolio of goals that people have for a healthy ocean and scores how well coastal countries and their marine territories optimize their potential ocean benefits. What drives goal scores? Present Status makes up 50% of each goal score and its Trend for the past 5 years makes up 67% of Likely Future Status. Thus 83% of a goal score reflects how sustainably a What’s the difference between a goal and a benefit?Each goal expresses a broad, goal’s benefits are actually being achieved now and in the recent past. Pressures and Resilience make up long-term purpose: optimizing a maximum sustainable flow of benefits to people. Benefitse ar the the remaining 17% of the scores. Individual pressures are ranked for their importance to different goals. specific and measurable goods (e.g. fish), services (e.g. coastal otection)pr or cultural values (e.g. sense Even though they only affect 8.5% of the score, Resilience actions are the only ways we can reduce of place) that the ocean provides. pressures and increase a score. Without effective Resilience, negative trends will continue. New resilience measures improve scores gradually, because status trend must shed five years of pre-resilience values, How were goals selected? For the global study, participating scientists, economists and but each year should bring more rapid improvement. sociologists reviewed existing studies of what people want and expect from the ocean, then grouped them into ten categories called ‘goals.’ Independent assessments at smaller scales could choose a How is a country’s score calculated? The score for a country or territory is the average of its different number of goals. goal scores. Goals not applicable to a region are not scored or averaged. Most goals are scored for a country’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), that is, waters out to 200 nautical miles (nm) from shore; but Are some goals more important than others? They may be for some countries, but at the several goals are scored for waters out to 3 nm. For a country with more than one EEZ, the score is the global level the Index weights all goals evenly. Nations could re-value goals as part of an independent area-weighted average of the several EEZ scores. Scores are calculated for 220 EEZs, representing all of assessment. the world’s 151 coastal countries and their territorial holdings. How is a goal scored? Each goal scores from 0 to 100. The amount of each benefit is compared How is the overall score calculated? The overall score is the area-weighted average of scores with a sustainable reference point. The most recent value, ‘present Status,’ forms half of the score. The for all countries and territories. What does the score mean? All scores range from 0 to 100. other half, ‘likely Future status’ is based on three things: the average rate of change for status (Trend) • 100’ means that the evaluated system has achieved its defined target (reference point), is during the most recent five years; the cumulative Pressures that will harm Future benefits; and the sustainably delivering all of the specified benefits that it can; and appears likely to be able to continue cumulative Resilience actions (e.g. treaties, laws, enforcement, habitat protection) that can reduce doing so in the near Future. pressures and maintain or raise Future Status and benefits. The global Index uses more than 80 global • ‘0’ means that global data were available, but the region either did not achieve any of the potential databases and strives to use the most current data available. It is updated and improved annually. benefits or that the benefits it did obtain were not gained in a sustainable manner. • Intermediate scores mean that the optimal benefit is not being obtained and/or is not being Detailed methods and data are at: www.oceanhealthindex.org/about/methods obtained in a sustainable way. The higher the score, the closer a region is to obtaining the maximal sustainable benefits possible with the given reference points. 1 2 Is it possible to score 100? Scores of 100 are surely achievable for individual goals. Country Are scores comparable place-to-place? All results of the Ocean Health Index’s global scores of 100 may be possible, but no country is close yet. Several remote territories have scored 90 or assessments are comparable geographically (place-to-place), because all regions are assessed using more. Some countries may underuse ocean benefits like food or tourism to protect resources for the the same methods and data sources. The global assessment only employs data drawn from global-level Future, thereby producing a score less than 100 in the current calculation. Negative trade-offs between databases in which similar data have been taken in the same manner for all regions. goals (and perhaps between countries or territories) could occur. For example, development that increased Tourism & Recreation could compromise coastal habitats, decreasing scores in Carbon Are scores comparable year-to-year? Yes, but only by using scores available at Storage, Coastal Protection, Clean Water, Biodiversity or Food Provision. Maximizing benefits from www.oceanhealthindex.org. The Ocean Health Index is relatively young and still evolving. Since its extractive goals such as Food Provision or natural Products could decrease benefits from other goals. launch in 2012, improvements have been incorporated each year. Some improvements, such as changes Conversely, high scores for Clean Water, Biodiversity, Coastal Protection, Sense of Place and Carbon in the methods, data layers or reference points used to evaluate goals, may cause substantial changes to Storage could improve the flow of benefits from other goals. Without detailed quantitative scores. When such changes occur, all earlier scores are recalculated using the new techniques so that understanding of such tradeoffs and interactions, it isn’t possible to say whether a country or global any differences in scores between years is due to changes in the conditions evaluated, not to changes in score of 100 is theoretically possible, but we aren’t really close enough to worry about that yet. methods. Therefore, all results of the Ocean Health Index’s global assessments are comparable year-to- year. Only the most recently posted scores should be used, as scores published in earlier years may have How can I discover why a score is high or low? First, visit the Data Explorer, which displays changed. The Ocean Health Index website, www.oceanhealthindex.org, is the most up-to-date source scores for the four ‘dimensions’ that comprise a score: Status, Trend, Pressures and Resilience. for scores. Dimension scores will give a hint about where problems (or successes) reside. What are independent assessments and how comparable are they? The Ocean Health Each dimension is derived from many databases, each of which measures one or more specific Index’s key strategy for driving ocean improvement is enlisting, encouraging and assisting countries to factors, for example the sea level rise, the extent of marine and terrestrial protected areas, the number or carry out their own independent assessments. The rationale is that countries or sub-regions may have people employed in the tourism sector, the extent of coral reefs, the risk of extinction for marine species finer-scale data available that cannot be used in global-level assessments because other countries do not or iconic species,