Contemporary Marine Science, its Utility and Influence on Regulation and Government Policy

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Background

Marine science matters; not just to advance knowledge on marine ecosystems, but also to guide government policy and regulations for marine management. In recent decades, human activities increasingly occur in the marine environment, including dredging for aggregates or bottom trawling, sediment emplacement at sea, the establishment of hydrocarbon-associated structures such as wellheads and pipelines, energy extraction projects as offshore windfarms, and tidal and wave power, along with communication cables and the challenges surrounding artificial reefs. All these activities are subject to design and risk-related research, and a range of applied science driven by regulatory processes and applicable science conducted for government agencies. The public assume that the most appropriate and rigorous science is used objectively to underpin regulation and policy.

The best science must be available to regulators and policymakers, but to benefit society, it must be translated and applied defensibly. Key questions thus include whether regulators can effectively assess the quality of science and its practical value when developing regulations, and whether the science is effectively translated into policy and government spending. The issue is also compounded in part by the manner of science funding in the context of academic and other career advancement.

Regulation and policy can be improved by increasing:

i. visibility of the physical and environmental sciences
ii. understanding of the nature of science, its variable quality, and its limitations
iii. the range of expertise in regulatory and policy-making environments, to include those trained in oceanography, marine geoscience, and environmental change, and
iv. improving communication and transparency throughout the regulation and policy-making process.

For example, our understanding of past sediment accumulation and marine environmental change has important implications for regulation and policy and has been recently boosted by advances in dating core sediments and developing marine environmental proxies. However, regulations rarely consider such understanding, nor timescales greater than a few years.
We invite papers evaluating contemporary marine science, its quality and the interactions between science, regulation, and government policy. Partly in the context of marine development, submitted papers may address one or more of the following themes:

i. The nature of past, present, and planned marine developments, and relevant science.
ii. Primary marine science, physical and otherwise, examining temporal change and spatial variability.
iii. Applied and intended applicable marine environmental science, including assessments of science quality.
iv. The scientific basis of marine regulations and policy, including the physical dynamics.
v. Which science to use? How agencies understand the scientific process, how their systems assess science quality and deal with uncertainties & gaps, and how they are influenced by politics.
vi. How major marine science initiatives are developed and managed by government agencies: exemplars, failures and opportunities for future improvements.
vii. The role of education in knowledge transfer during policy development.
viii. Implications for marine management of science quality and management exemplars, innovations, and failures in other scientific fields.

We welcome original research, case studies, review articles, authoritative opinion and new methods.

Keywords: Marine science, policy, regulation

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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