What a fantastic end-of-the-year note- SOCPacific2R will be funded!

Announcing the great and flabbergasting (love this word!) news that the SOCPacific follow-up project “A Sea of Connections: Valuing Reef Passages in the South Pacific Region” (SOCPacific2R) got selected for funding by ANR/DFG, as one out of 13 proposals selected in this year’s binational call in their Social Sciences and Humanities Programme. Once again based on a partnership between USP, IRD and ZMT while involving a larger consortium of external partners, this new project will start in September 2024 for 3-4 years. Extremely humbled and grateful to be able to further collaborate with this extraordinary group of scientists!

The reef passages connecting coastal waters and the open ocean are known as outstanding hotspots of biodiversity and productivity. Hence, they are of multifaceted significance for the overall health of coral reef ecosystems and for Oceanians. SOCPacific2R explores these social-ecological ‘keystone places’ and ‘communication zones’ that have hardly been investigated by natural and social sciences.

With its empirical focus on New Caledonia and Fiji, and based on a trusted and interdisciplinary Pacific-French-German partnership, the SOCPacific2R aims at:

1. Conducting a transdisciplinary study of reef passages as under-researched features of social-ecological coral reef systems that constitute complex, interconnected, and dynamic assemblages of living and non-living, dwelling and transiting, entities that interact with each other;
2. Documenting both area-based and other management and conservation arrangements applied to reef passages, including pros and cons that local stakeholder groups identify;
3. Establishing a participatory science-society-policy dialogue informed by social-ecological studies, Oceanian socio-cosmologies and sovereignties, and governance norms in/for the management and conservation of reef passages.

Through interrelated objectives and components, SOCPacific2R will both embrace and feed the vision of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030) and will facilitate the integration of reef passages in future marine/ocean policy and practice.

SOCPacific2R will directly and actively engage various stakeholder groups throughout the research process. It will provide holders of customary rights, policy-makers and other stakeholders with evidence-based research and exchange fora to empower them for the joint management and conservation of reef passages.