Capacity Strengthening

We apply a multi-level strategy to capacity strengthening that will help all actors to enact their responsibilities to protect the ocean for the benefit of all.

Participation in research cruises allows trainees to develop skills in sampling the marine environment, and is an important step in building capacity for deep-sea science. Photo: NERC Funded Deep Links Project

The Hub creates an enabling environment for integrated, challenge-led, ocean governance research.

The interconnected ocean is  threatened by multiple pressures emerging from various sectors that operate at different scales. The world’s responses to these pressures are fragmented and not up to the challenge of ensuring a healthy ocean to the benefit of all.

The One Ocean Hub brings together five interconnected research programmes to support more integrated, evidence-based and inclusive responses to the multiple threats facing the ocean. Threats that include plastics and climate change.

 Our focus on ocean governance aims to explore the full potential of the law to better protect the marine environment and ensure just and inclusive decisions for those most negatively affected by the deteriorating health of the ocean. We are advancing understanding of  invisible and marginalised knowledges, practices and economies, and solutions to social and environmental injustices that need to inform marine planning at all levels.

In particular, we focus on the links between human rights and environmental law in order to foster an inclusive and transparent sustainable blue economy. This is informed by local and customary knowledge, Deep Sea research of the underexplored South East Atlantic, Fisheries Science and Resource Management tools and knowhow, and multiple other sources of expertise.

A holistic, ecosystem approach can develop a variety of contextually relevant socio-ecological and governance responses to threats to the health of the ocean and the communities that rely on it. We also anticipate that emotionally connecting people and polities to the ocean will create a  lasting, multi-generational interest in ocean protection. We achieve this through the arts, where creative artefacts and experiences can help to raise awareness, inform and evoke interest in addressing ocean challenges, and through ocean literacy programmes, that make the ocean and its life supporting functions a part of our regular vocabulary.