Protecting marine biodiversity

Marine Protected Areas tend not to get the same air-time as their terrestrial cousins, but Conservation Management is working to change all that. We have recently been working with Parks Australia staff on adapting the Conservation Standards for use in the Australian Marine Parks context (see blog post here).

And as part of our global remit we have been supporting our colleagues at FOS Europe in their work with the Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management (SwAM), the government authority responsible for planning and managing Sweden’s Marine Protected Area Network.

This work involved a collaborative project with national and county-based staff responsible for managing the marine environment. The end result is a framework, based on the open standards, that is now being used to design and manage Sweden’s marine protected areas. It is already generating a lot of interest amongst government agencies in other European countries and beyond.

Our role was to support our FOS colleagues in collating data, analysing its quality, and compiling the information into an interactive dashboard that is now in use by national and county staff. Further detail about this work is in this blog post by FOS Europe, including links to download a summary and the full framework and the guidance materials.

If you’d like to know more, get a guided tour of the framework and method by signing up for a webinar in November 2021. Co-hosted by SwAM and FOS Europe, the webinar will walk you through the components and steps, and you will have the opportunity to ask questions.