Regular Process Southwest Pacific Regional Workshop
25-27 February 2013, Brisbane, Australia
Workshop objectives:
- As recommended by the Ad Hoc Working Group of the Whole in February 2011,1 workshops are recognized as a key mechanism by which the First Global Integrated Marine Assessment will be accomplished and States can enhance their assessment capacity. Workshops will facilitate dialogue between the Group of Experts of the Regular Process ("Group of Experts") and representatives and experts from States and competent intergovernmental organizations. These guidelines are intended to make clear how a set of workshops should be organized in support of the first phase of the first cycle of the Regular Process. The following guidelines will help ensure the credibility and legitimacy of the output of each workshop, and thus of the Regular Process in general.
- The objectives of each of the set of workshops should be to:
- Review and evaluate all assessments considered by the participants to be relevant to the sea area under consideration and, on the basis of those evaluations, compile an inventory of assessments likely to be useful for the Regular Process. The assessments to be considered should be both those related to environmental issues and those related to socio-economic issues. If necessary, arrangements should be initiated for access to those assessments by the Group of Experts and the secretariat of the Regular Process;
- Start building a network between experts and organizations taking part in each workshop, and the Group of Experts and the secretariat of the Regular Process;
- Identify the capacity-building needs of States taking part in the workshop needed to allow them to contribute more fully to, and benefit more fully from, the Regular Process, including identification of priorities, and identify steps that those States could usefully take to build the capacities of competent intergovernmental organizations (if any) through which the States collaborate;
- Start building capacity for integrated assessment, which could include discussing and developing:
- Common information content for assessments at various scales and common approaches towards assessment methodologies;
- Approaches for scaling up assessments (national, subregional, regional, global ?that is, establishing how far assessments at one level can be used at other levels); and
- Reporting forms to assist the integration process, with the aim of securing coherence, consistency and comparability as far as possible);
- Consider the linkages between driving factors and the state of the marine environment as reflected in assessment.
This list of objectives, the preparatory work set out in Appendix I and the outline agenda at Appendix II will constitute the terms of reference of the workshops.
Specifically, the Southwest Pacific Workshop is designed to accomplish the following:
- Enhance dialogue between marine experts within governments, intergovernmental organizations, and regional initiatives.
- Develop an inventory of environmental and socio-economic marine assessments for the Southwest Pacific.
- Consider the linkages among assessments, including driving factors and the state of the marine environment.
- Identify marine assessment capacity-building needs of the Southwest Pacific and consider means to address those needs.
- Facilitate the integration of marine assessments in the region through discussing and developing:
- common information content for assessments at various scales
- common approaches towards assessment methodologies and geographically scaling-up assessments; and
- assessment reporting templates and other best practices to enable integration
Contact for more information
For all queries related to the Regular Process Workshop, please contact us at regularprocessSWPAC@environment.gov.au .