Policy Needs for Oceans and Human Health

This Policy Brief summarises the policy challenges when attempting to address both ocean and human health together, and the cooperation and research needed to enable those challenges to be addressed.

Download the policy brief and the illustrations.

This Policy Brief has been created jointly by the SOPHIE project and the European Marine Board. It is based on the findings of the Policy Report by Seascape Belgium, and the Strategic Research Agenda.

The health of humans and of the ocean are inextricably linked. Humans can gain benefits from the oceans and its ecosystem services including food and energy, but their health can also be at risk from aspects such as storms and pollution. In turn, the health of the ocean can be significantly impacted by human activity, and therefore a balance needs to be sought to safeguard the health of both.

However, at present, there is no policy at the national or European level that explicitly addresses Oceans and Human Health (OHH). This Policy Brief proposes a way to address this challenge through research, collaboration, training and data.

Recommendations

Recommendations are made on how to move towards address ocean health and human health holistically within the current policy framework. These are:

• To promote the development of a ‘Health (and Environment) in All Policies’ (HiAP) approach;
• To link human health to ocean health policies;
• To embed “marine” in the study and practice of Environment and Health;
• To design and implement dedicated OHH indicators;
• To support evidence-based management in an OHH context;
• To build an integrated architecture for health and environmental data in Europe;
• To better understand the benefits of monitoring for policies covering both ocean and human health;
• To safeguard both ocean and human health through systematic assessments; and
• To increase the support for OHH in research, sectoral and regional cooperation programmes.