Marine biodiversity conservation governance and management: Regime requirements for global environmental change

Marine ecosystems are subject to a range of likely impacts from drivers of environmental change, including human-induced climate change that is warming sea surface temperatures, altering ocean chemistry and affecting run-off of land-based pollutants and sediments. Such transformations will challenge the adequacy of governance and management regimes for conserving marine biodiversity. Assessment of the fitness of current governance and management regimes to meet the challenges, including their adaptive capacity, can be established through an understanding of what is required for an effective response. We provide such a foundation by identifying governance and management requirements that would support the resilience of marine biodiversity and ecosystems and associated social-ecological systems. The requirements were established through an expert panel methodology in conjunction with an analysis of relevant literature. We explain the relevance of these requirements to marine biodiversity conservation in a changing climate under the following themes: Systems understanding, networks and learning; values and world views; institutional forms; leadership and resources; engagement and decision making; cohesion and direction; and governance quality. Informing institutional and management design using these requirements will enable the development of regimes more suited to meeting the fundamental challenges that unanticipated, abrupt and turbulent change poses for the conservation of marine biodiversity and the resilience of associated social-ecological systems. Such a governance and management regime would be more effective in managing social-ecological resilience because it has the capacity and flexibility to deal with change, founded on learning, diversity and ethics.