Modelling and understanding future scenarios

By consulting with stakeholders and local communities, co-created future scenarios can be used to communicate potential future environmental status and engage with and connect stakeholders who look to explore sustainable solutions. The integration of climate, ecological and social data can be used to set future scenarios and help to change behaviours and attitudes and encourage pro-environmental actions.

Also, through the development of scientific models and their application to forecast the long-term changes in physical and biogeochemical ocean properties, the productive capacity of marine fisheries under different future climate and fisheries management scenarios can be projected. By projecting fish production and catch potential under different fishing mortality targets, links can be made to economic models to assess opportunities and threats to future fisheries income. By providing data from the models on coral reefs and their biodiversity, the fish stocks and the distribution of species to the fisheries managers and decision-makers, the management of fish stocks can be better informed and monitored. In turn the livelihoods of small-scale fishers and food security of coastal communities across the region can be considered.