The Sur Center for Maritime Futures is an institutional concept developed by VisionArc for a client working in conjunction with the Omani Ministry of Culture and Heritage. We were challenged to bring contemporary thinking to the historical depth and positive future for maritime activity in the Gulf state. The new Center will build upon the rich history of boat building, international trade, and coastal habitation that have shaped Omani society. Its long-term mission will be to strengthen the historic continuity between Oman’s maritime past and the future: threading together a wide range of social, cultural, economic, and technological opportunities for coastal culture in Oman.

The Center will function as a hub for maritime heritage, providing a platform for Culture, Education,Technology, and Leadership. The Center will be a robust and valuable asset to Sur, the Ash Sharqiyah region, and to the nation by building and sustaining links between these four key interests. These programs will be organized into a series of clusters capable of operating independently or collaboratively.

VisionArc’s analysis illustrated the interconnected environmental, economic and political dimensions of the regeneration plan. The analysis formed the basis for a series of proposals that were designed to negotiate multiple stakeholders and scales of concern. The proposals offered strategic design as a vital tool for moving beyond conventional urban typologies towards more holistic standards for urban development in ecologically important regions. Taken together VisionArc sought to create a picture of Pasaia as a place that can become a model for regional innovation and economic growth while also reinforcing an ecologically vulnerable but culturally rich locality.

Recommendations for the Bay of Pasaia regeneration plan are currently under ongoing consideration by the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa.

Contributing to this shift, Conservation International, National Geographic and The New England Aquarium have announced a collaboration to determine the feasibility of a so-called global Oceans Health Index. Conservation International reports that the purpose of the Index is to build a “scientifically solid and globally respected Ocean Health Index that reveals variations and trends in ocean health [and will] consolidate public, political, and corporate commitment to improve ocean health in places where it is poor or in decline.”

In the past, efforts to develop policies and strategies that address ocean health have been hindered by the ability of experts and policymakers to agree on a common metric for oceans health. This difficulty has been further exacerbated by one of scale too. ‘High seas’ territory, or mare liberum- Latin for free seas- accounts for 60% of the planets oceans- or about 83.4 million square miles of unregulated and mostly unprotected territory. This has encouraged a growing number of blind spots.

At present, only .5% of the world’s oceans are under some form or environmental protection, while terrestrial ecosystems come in at about 12%. Furthermore, U.S. federal space research investment in 2004 was more than 6 times that which was invested in oceans research (NASA/NCSE). This is despite the fact that in the same year the world’s oceans provided over 100 million tones of fish according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. Needless to say, a NASA food program has yet to be discussed.

Such disparities no doubt reflect different forms of valuation. Like the TEEB report, the challenge for an Ocean Health Index will be in developing not only a measurable system to quantify values, but also a flexible system to promote them in vastly different environmental and economic contexts. The flexibility here will be how effective such a system is at bridging between these different contexts in order to design a much needed- yet thus far little understood- definition of global commons governance for the world’s oceans and marine eco-services.

Conservation International and its partners have established a steering committee and will be developing a plan to publicly launch the Ocean Health Index on World Ocean’s Day on June 8, 2011.

Without a touch of irony, the growing environmental crisis has drawn a comparable (and perhaps analogous) type of cautionary focus. Yet, unlike economic and human capital, natural capital has no dedicated system of measurement, monitoring or reporting. However, a recent United Nations research initiative, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) suggests this may not be the case for long.

TEEB’s research seeks to develop new quantitative and evaluative tools to understand the inherent economic and external values embodied within specific ecosystems. Water filtration, storm management, waste treatment, climate regulation and the provision of food and medical supplies are all understood to be connected to direct social, environmental and economic benefits.

For example, a TEEB report describes that over 20% of the planet’s coral reefs are already seriously degraded or under imminent risk of collapse. While the global degeneration of coral reefs will impact different communities in different ways, those highly dependent on fish protein and local economic development through tourism could face dramatic loss. Coral reefs are therefore understood to embody a critical range of ecosystem service values. Preliminary TEEB estimates these to be 189,000 US$/hectare/year for natural hazard management; up to 1 million US$/hectare/year for tourism; up to 57,000 US$/ha/year for genetic materials and bio-prospecting; and up to 3,818 US$/ha/year for fisheries.

The study goes on to profile a series of other ecosystems including wetlands and forests, and provides assessed values for land use and certain genetic resources connected to major market segments such as the pharmaceutical industry.

Developing new mechanisms to measure the value of environmental services is of crucial importance, yet not without their limitations. These mechanisms may, after all, be vulnerable to the same flaws as those regulating the financial system. Without proper understanding and design, the invention of new markets and terminology for ecosystem services may undermine other, less quantifiable values such as those with moral or cultural significance.

The challenge in adopting the term “services” as a way to describe environmental benefits will be akin to adopting the term “growth” to describe financial gain- both risk a metaphor getting the better of initially good intentions. It will therefore be necessary to understand economic value as representing only one possible metric for benefits drawn from ecosystems and natural resources.

In the meantime, TEEB’s findings from preliminary reports prepared over the last two years will be presented next month at a global business symposium on biodiversity.