Future Oceans Around assessing Ocean Health Index

Once more, FOA shares knowledge with the 2º Bach students at IES Val Miñor. This time, we worked on the application of Ocean Health Index (OHI) as an independent assessment for Ría de Vigo region.

The OHI is a complex indicator that analyses the relations among oceans and societies. The index attempts to reveal how healthy is the ocean providing services and goods now and in the future, taking in account socio-ecological issues, current status, future trends and potential pressures and resilient capacities. The index was created by professor Ben Halpern, that will be in Vigo next week with us.

During the session, students applied their theoretical knowledge with a transdisciplinary management tool to assess at local scale the health of the ocean. The concept of an index, its applications, configurations and assumptions were topics discussed in the session. Besides theory, students re-organized the Ocean Health Index⁺ for Ría de Vigo (defining its perspective, weighing the goals and sub-goals and the components and sub-components) and also designing the variables to measure for the whole OHI⁺. Due the nature of the index, participants combined environmental and social interests, working as interdisciplinary scientists and socio-ecological managers.

As an outcome of this hard work, students learned to interpret results linked to complex contexts and understood the existing trade-offs between the complexity of reality and the simplicity required for a tool to be useful at any decision-making moment.

Thank you very much for your time, researchers.

See you in next challenge!