2015 Conference

Full Presentation Panel

The California Current, flowing down the west coast of North America, is rife with boundaries at many scales and between diverse interfaces, including in the spatial and temporal extent of its ecosystems and processes, the jurisdictions of the institutions that govern its waters and inhabitants, and the interests and impacts of the organizations and individuals that it nourishes. Managing the health of such a complex social-ecological system requires understanding the natural and human communities that occur within and across these boundaries. Supporting vibrant flora and fauna, economic vitality, educational potential, and other valuable ecosystem services requires engaging with numerous stakeholders and decision-makers throughout the California Current. Achieving successful outcomes in the present and sustainability in the future obliges us to draw on a broad diversity of perspectives, from local or state coastal planners and resource managers, to non-governmental advocates and local community co-managers, to scientists and end-users. Boundary organizations like the Center for Ocean Solutions (the Center), a collaboration among the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, facilitate these outcomes through strategic engagement and by recognizing that boundaries not only separate species, cultures, institutions, and technologies, but also join them. In this session, Center-affiliated researchers present four vignettes drawn from our work in the California Current system: each illustrates the importance of overcoming barriers to engagement and is focused on lessons from engaging different stakeholders and decision-makers at different scales. Through these examples, we explore broad interdisciplinary themes, including challenges and opportunities for applied research and citizen-science, the role of boundary organizations, and the attributes of cross-disciplinary, cross-sectoral solutions to wicked problems in a system as complex and important as the California Current.

CONFIRMED PANELIST ABSTRACTS (4)

1. Enhancing Agency Capacity as a Boundary Organization

Eric Hartge - Senior Research Analyst, Center for Ocean Solutions

As coastal climate hazards increasingly threaten livelihoods, stakeholders and decision-makers are addressing the impacts at multiple scales despite a limited capacity to engage with the scientific community. Without adequate science or communication conduits, some climate adaptation policy responses can be woefully inadequate when compared to the immense scale of impacts. In our experience working with coastal adaptation policy, the Center for Ocean Solutions (the Center) bridges this gap by developing cutting-edge ecosystem services science and translating it into local planning contexts. Boundary organizations such as ours are uniquely suited to serve as key conveners, translators, and liaisons while acting within the constraints and demands of current policy settings. Through co-developing solutions with adaptation practitioners, our collaborative team has expanded the nature of a public-private partnership by bringing private funding, interdisciplinary expertise, and the knowledge required to transfer scientific analysis into applied legal frameworks for successful adaptation solutions. This discussion will draw from the Center’s role as an “Information Liaison” between multiple counties that are currently addressing climate adaptation through local planning efforts on the coast of the California Current. Our initial engagements with Monterey, Santa Cruz, Marin and Sonoma counties have led to significant lessons that we are compiling, distilling, and distributing to other coastal counties and cities. In this role, we are using an iterative, interdisciplinary approach to enhance the capacity of regional and state-level planners to promote successful coastal adaptation in California. Participants will learn about lessons for 1) convening multi-jurisdictional dialogue; 2) translating best available science into policy with collaborative, interdisciplinary teams; 3) co-developing strategies in multiple planning jurisdictions to improve transferability; and 4) replicating this approach in other areas.

2. Overcoming barriers to incorporating ecosystem services into coastal management: the case of coastal ecosystem carbon storage in California

Aaron Strong - Emmett-Interdisciplinary Program in Environment & Resources, Stanford University

Coastal wetland ecosystems occupy the boundary between land and ocean and not only provide critical habitat to larval fish, numerous migratory avian species, and unique vegetation communities, but also are substantial sinks of anthropogenic carbon dioxide. Globally, annual carbon sequestration rates in tidal wetlands, salt marshes, coastal mangrove forests, and sea grass beds are on the order of 100s of Tg C y-1, the same order of magnitude as the annual anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions from California's economy. Human activity over the last two centuries has destroyed ninety percent of California’s historical coastal wetlands and numerous recent studies have identified significant opportunities for actions to conserve, enhance or restore the carbon sequestration potential in these coastal ecosystems, including those within the California Current. In light of this potential, there have been calls for better incorporation of “blue carbon”—the carbon stored in coastal wetlands—into coastal environmental management frameworks at local scales. The California Coastal Conservancy has recently granted funds for climate ready activities in coastal areas, including the enhancement of carbon sequestration in coastal ecosystems. There have also been proposals to include coastal wetland carbon storage within the nascent carbon offsets frameworks developed by the California Air Resources Board under the state’s Global Warming Solutions Act. Yet only a handful of the institutions and organizations poised to take advantage of these opportunities are currently doing so. Based on a series of interviews with environmental managers and advocates working up and down the California coast, I present a typology of the technical, political, institutional, and socio-cultural barriers to the further incorporation of blue carbon into coastal environmental management, and the specific institutional, ecological, and cultural conditions under which the restoration of this ecosystem service has found traction.

3. Barriers and opportunities for stakeholder engagement in Mexican small-scale fisheries

Elena Finkbeiner - Early Career Fellow, Center for Ocean Solutions

The California Current bridges an important boundary between two disparate geopolitical systems: the United States and Mexico. Running parallel to the Pacific coast of the Baja California Peninsula, the California Current provides livelihood opportunities, food security, and national revenue for Mexico through small-scale fisheries. Despite being intricately linked through biological and physical properties, fisheries in California and Baja California are characterized by different governance and stakeholder engagement processes. Many small-scale fishers in Baja California are organized into cooperatives and linked at higher scales through cooperative federations. The Mexican agency charged with fisheries governance similarly operates across scales with federal, state, and municipal bodies. In some instances, this cross-scale governance structure coupled with the vertical and horizontal organization of small-scale fishers has resulted in stakeholder engagement in policy processes and functional co-managed fisheries. Despite the fact that this organizational structure provides good opportunity for stakeholder engagement, the co-managed fisheries of Baja California are the exception not the norm. Often, bureaucracy, corruption, and a lack of governance capacity and resources can undermine attempts at participatory processes and stakeholder engagement. I use a recent policy change in Mexican fisheries to illustrate the reverberating effects of top-down governance with limited stakeholder engagement on livelihoods, the economy, and even the environment. From this case study, I draw lessons to demonstrate the importance of stakeholder engagement in policy change and to highlight potential ways of transcending barriers to engagement across geopolitical boundaries in the California Current system.

4. Surfers as Scientists: Connecting stakeholders to resource management with citizen-science

Dan Reineman - Emmett-Interdisciplinary Program in Environment & Resources, Stanford University

Breaking waves are a vital resource in the California Current. In addition to playing a critical role in coastal ecosystems, they enable an estimated one million Californians to surf and thereby contribute to the identity, culture, and economies of many communities. By developing a framework conceptualizing the human dimensions of waves as resources, I highlight a boundary separating resource users and communities from the decision-makers tasked with managing the coast whose actions shape waves themselves. Unlike other commonly studied resources, like fishing, in which resource-users are directly coupled with the resource, both deriving benefits and causing impacts, surfers who derive benefits from waves are not responsible for causing impacts to them. Rather, these impacts result from activities in other coastal other coastally-connected sectors and management actions that disrupt natural coastal processes, including processes that shape waves; sea-level rise will likely exacerbate these negative effects. Also unlike fisheries, which in recent decades have witnessed concerted efforts to incorporate fishers themselves into fisheries management, no such efforts have been undertaken for coastal management vis-à-vis waves, despite the importance of surfing in many coastal communities. Here I present first steps towards more formal engagement of surfers as resource-users and stakeholders in coastal management. Using the philosophy of a citizen-science approach, we surveyed more than one thousand California surfers to understand the breadth and depth of their wave knowledge, to predict the impacts of sea-level rise on wave resources, and to document intangible benefits, like sense-of-place, that surfers derive from waves. In so doing, this work lays the groundwork for more substantive stakeholder collaboration in wave and coastal management. This vignette underscores the benefits of considering the full complexity of a coupled social-ecological system for revealing boundaries between its key components and of community-engaged approaches to resource management research and solutions.