Developing a State of the Marine Environment Report (SOMER) of the Benguela current Large Marine Ecosystem (BCLME)

The Benguela Current Commission (BCC) is an inter-governmental and multisectoral commission established by the Republics of South Africa, Namibia and Angola with the goal of spearheading regional collaboration for integrated management, sustainable development and protection of the environment using an ecosystem approach to ocean governance in the Benguela Current Large Marine Ecosystem (BCLME).

As a major step towards achieving this goal, the BCC published the first State of the Marine Environment Report (SOMER) in 2014. The aim of this report was to promote a science-to-governance approach in the BCLME to enable addressing climate change, sustainable management of natural resources and ocean space, and to facilitate blue economic development. The BCC now wishes to update and improve the 2014 SOMER, with a second SOMER that will feature Climate Change as a national, regional and global priority given its impacts on marine ecosystem variability and change, natural resources abundance and distribution, water quality, and the socio- and macro-economics of ocean industries.

OneWorld as project lead, in partnership with CapMarine, has been commissioned to draft the second SOMER which will elaborate on the 2014 SOMER by incorporating novel themes, such as governance, and climate change as a cross-cutting theme.

OneWorld will review current literature, policy documents and national/regional report documents to ascertain the most relevant indicators to inform the major themes of the BCC SOMER, their data availability across all three Member States as well as their suitability for incorporation into the Regional Integrated Information Management System (RIIMS). This will allow the continual updating of SOMER-related data and thus lead to the development of a ‘live’ SOMER. Data will be collected and analysed under the Driving forces-Pressures-State-Impacts-Response (DPSIR) Framework, and incorporated into the second SOMER.

OneWorld will also host stakeholder engagements with teams to validate the findings and ensure that the SOMER is aligned with other national/regional documents for the BCC, such as the National Adaption Plans and the Strategic Action Plans. These engagements will also inform the recommendations made in the second SOMER for effective management of the BCLME.