 Some of her honors include membership in the National Academy of Sciences, 20 honorary doctoral degrees, a MacArthur Genius grant, and the Blue Planet Prize. She served as the president of Ecological Society of America, the American Association for Advancement of Science, and the International Council for Science. Jane was a professor at Harvard and at Oregon State University, and then served as Undersecretary of Commerce and Administrator of NOAA in the Obama Administration, healthy on days of the Obama Administration. I heard an interview from Toni Morrison recently who said that when there was a book that wasn't out there for her to read, she had to write it. And I think that Jane has that same sort of feeling when there's a gap somewhere, there's a need for some sort of an organization, Jane just goes out and creates it. She was the founder of Compass, of the Leopold Leadership Program, of Climate Central, and others. These are all unique organizations that are working to make a real change and using science in the service of society as she laid out in that social contract for science. She's been an inspiration to me throughout my career, and I know that if she's not already an inspiration to you, she will be within the next hour, so please join me in welcoming the honorable Dr. Jane Lubchenko. And thank you so very much. I am so proud to claim you as my academic daughter, and that's not just because of all the nice things you said. One of the things that Bruce and I are really proud of are our academic kids, and that doesn't mean just going on to be professors in universities. It means doing important things wherever that work takes you and doing it in a way that can find a good life work balance, and I just think you've done a magnificent job. And truth be told, I think one of the reasons we are really interested in accepting you as a student was because, as I recall, you were an English major. And we're always looking for scientists who actually can write and speak and do other things above and beyond and do really good science. It is a great pleasure to be here at the Natural Capital Symposium. This is such an amazing group of people from all around the world that are engaged in incredibly important work, and I'm very honored to be asked to give one of the keynote addresses and really pleased to have an opportunity to spend a little time sharing some thoughts with you this evening. When I talked to Ann and to Mary about ideas for what I might focus on, one thing that they asked me to do was to really focus on science as ways that I have seen through my career, ways that science is really essential to governments and to civil society. And so what I'd like to do tonight is sort of in honor and celebration of what Nat Cap is. And in thanks to Ann and Mary and Gretchen and the amazing team of Nat Capers, what I really wanna do is focus on science in the context of this major, major global challenges that we have underway. Make no mistake, the challenges are incredibly daunting. The global social and environmental challenges that we have are so overwhelming, it's easy to give up. And as Gretchen noted last night, we're really facing intense and increasing planetary destruction and human suffering. And that pretty much encapsulates it. However, we are all here, you and me, we're all here together because we feel it's really important for us to tackle those challenges. And we believe that we actually can make some headway and make a difference. I'm here because I really wanna focus on the essential role that science has to play in this science societal challenge. What I'm gonna share with you tonight really has a few key messages. So I just wanna start with the bottom line for you. Number one is that civil society and governments need science. I say this as someone who has been on both sides or all sides of that. And I'll describe what I mean by that more specifically. Secondly, that we have strong evidence that science can actually help drive change. Three, the people who are in this room are in positions to really make a difference in terms of strengthening and empowering the science society connection that I think needs to be strengthened and empowered. And there is no better time than now to actually move on with doing that. This is what a lot of you are doing in your everyday jobs. It's time to up the ante here. It's really time to get more engaged. We have new challenges on the horizon and now are some great opportunities. So I'm gonna go through sort of this sequence of thoughts. I'm gonna tell you where I'm coming from. I'm gonna give you a sense of how scientists are responding to some of the new and growing challenges. But I'm gonna give you some examples from the ocean to sprinkle a little wet and salty stuff around the room and then sort of tie that together with some lessons learned and end with an element of hope. So let's dive in. I'm an academic. I've been an academic for most of my life. I'm a marine ecologist. I've had an opportunity to work around the world and I have seen firsthand much of the degradation and devastation that either you know about or perhaps you've read about, whether it's loss of biodiversity in the ocean, dead zones, depleted fisheries, plastics. Whoa, what happened there? My Stanford wireless service just popped up on my screen and I can't find my cursor to do something about it. I need some A-B help please. You guys are seeing that slide but I'm not. Thank you. See if there's no cursor there. It disappeared. Oops, there it is. Okay, hopefully that won't happen again. Stanford wireless. Somebody's invading. Okay, so I bring very much an ecological perspective to these I think in terms of systems, interactions, not just within ecosystems but ecosystems and people. But then I had the opportunity to spend four years on President Obama's science team and work with people at very senior levels throughout the administration as well as lots of people that NOAA serves. NOAA focuses on weather, climate, oceans and coasts. It does science, it supports science and then it uses science to make weather forecasts, to manage fisheries, to describe the changes that are underway in our climate, to think about climate adaptation, et cetera. So I had an opportunity to connect with the users of that science. And I also had an opportunity to connect with a lot of governors and members of Congress and even do things like not just testify before Congress multiple times but actually do demonstration for Congress in the lower left hand corner here. This is for a congressional committee and I'm doing some lab demonstrations of ocean acidification. And I can tell you this is a very rare event for a congressional testimony and some of them didn't quite know what to make of it but they were full of questions. I also had an opportunity to spend two years as the first US science envoy for the ocean and to travel internationally as an official science diplomat to talk about ocean issues in developing countries around the world. And I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a few minutes. In addition to that though, I've had a lot of experience with scientific societies, with NGOs, with philanthropies, with the business community, with the finance communities. Either through partnerships or serving as boards or a leader in scientific professional societies, et cetera. So what I'm trying to do is integrate all these different perspectives into my thinking about science and society and how important it is for the way forward. As I was experiencing all of those, I had a number of experiences that have helped me think differently about some of the challenges of connecting science to government, of connecting the science to civil society. And one of those is often the preconceived ideas that people have about the individuals that they're interacting with. The story that I'm gonna tell is an example of that. Vice President Biden shown here, swearing me in, about a year after this happened, we were dealing with the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. And Noah was right in the middle of a lot of the issues having to do with the oil spill. The vice president asked the president, I'm sorry, the president asked the vice president to go to the Gulf of Mexico and talk to fishermen and describe to them what the federal government was doing, what we knew about the oil spill in fisheries. And the vice president said, I'm happy to go to the Gulf and talk to fishermen. I need somebody who knows what the government is doing, knows about oil and fisheries and can help explain it to me and set me right or set me, yeah, set me right if I say something wrong. So I flew with the vice president on Air Force Two down to the Gulf of Mexico and was briefing him on the plane about fisheries, about oil, how oil affects different types of seafood differently, affects fish differently from shrimp and crabs, differently from oysters, for example. And I was explaining all of this to him and then telling him what the government was doing to close fisheries so that we didn't have any contaminated seafood being consumed by people, et cetera. And partway through this, he stopped me and he said, I thought you were a scientist. And I thought, oh my gosh, what did I say, what did I do? And he said to me, I just understood everything you said. So here is a very, very distinguished and smart politician who has been briefed thousands of times by scientists and yet he thought he was not gonna be able to understand what I was saying. So it just illustrates one of the challenges of connecting science to society is making sure that we are being effective and bilingual as scientists and not just talking in nerdy, jargony terms but speaking in lay language that people can understand. I also had a somewhat similar experience with a member of Congress. We, NOAA, builds weather forecasts with NASA and then flies them and those, I'm sorry, we build weather satellites and then fly those weather satellites and those weather satellites provide over 90% of the data that go into your weather forecast. And we had a problem with the program that we were using or with the program that was building the next generation of weather satellites. Fixed that and then I had to go report to Congress how we had fixed it and tell them how important it was for them to fund the next generation of weather satellites so that we would continue to have better and better weather forecasts, more timely, more accurate, et cetera. And this one member of Congress said to me, doctor, I don't need your weather satellites. I've got the weather channel. And I thought, okay, that means I maybe better take a couple steps back and explain to him that the weather channel and AccuWeather and all the other private weather providers get their information from NOAA and 95% of that comes from the satellites. So as we're talking about science and society, civil society, governments, we need to make sure that the kinds of communications that we're not talking past one another, that we actually can connect in really meaningful ways. And that's not an easy thing to do. These experiences are likely mirrored by many that each of you have had in your interactions as you're doing partnerships and outreach. They're not unusual. I've been concerned for some time that much of what the scientific community has been doing has not been as connected to the real world as needs to be the case. And Ann mentioned this earlier, but in 1998, the address that I had given earlier as the presidential address to AAAS, I published with this title, focusing on the need for academics to get out of the ivory tower and to engage more with society and share what they were learning through research, not just with one another through scientific publications, but indeed directly with the public, directly with policymakers, directly with the business community. Over the last two and a half decades, the scientific community has been doing more and more of that and I was not the only one calling for it. The scientific community has, I think, made a couple of significant pivots, changes in how it's behaving from just doing science to also sharing it more broadly and more recently from not just communication, but to actual engagement and partnerships and collaborations. And I see these as very, very positive steps and they are mirrored by what a lot of you are doing. It's also going from doing just basic science to also doing use-inspired science and from simply characterizing problems, identifying them to actually co-crafting, co-divising solutions. And I think we've seen and need to feel proud that in fact there have been evolutions in the academic community in part in response to what society has needed. So I think we can feel good about that. What the scientific community does and how it does it has already changed significantly. And I think this is encouraging, it's positive, it gives us hope that in fact we can go the next step and have the next iteration that's needed. So I've talked a little bit about my perspectives and in general, in very general terms, the responses of scientists to these growing needs of society. Let me make that a little more concrete by focusing on some ocean examples of how scientists are engaging, how there's use-inspired science that is being done and brought to the table, how communities are working together to craft new solutions. And I would suggest to you that in fact there is a plethora of really amazing stuff that is bubbling up from all over the world. You don't hear much about the good stuff because indeed there is a lot of bad stuff but among all the doom and gloom there actually is a lot of hope. It's not at the scale we need but there are good things that are happening that we can learn from and we can figure out how to accelerate and scale it up. So it's happening because of new science and because scientists are engaging. And I'm going to give you three examples. One, reform of fisheries. Two, tackling, dealing with illegal fishing and the type of marine protected areas that are strongly to fully protected that we call marine reserves. So let's dive in. The grand challenge with the oceans to sort of take a broad view here is the following. Can we use the ocean without using it up? Can we use it in ways that are equitable without using it up? That's a subset of the planetary challenge obviously but I think it's useful to frame it in those terms. Marine ecosystems provide a wealth of ecosystem services of benefits to nature. They provide a lot of things that people are aware of and they provide a lot of things that people are less aware of. Oceans provide half of the oxygen that you breathe. So they're pretty important. Oceans absorb over 90% of the energy and excess heat that is trapped by greenhouse gases. And oceans absorb over 40% of the carbon dioxide that we emit. So in addition to the obvious things that people look to the oceans for, some of which are listed on this slide, there are a lot of hidden things that the ocean does for each of us that we need to be aware of and take into account. So the ocean provides a wealth of benefits. However, overfishing, habitat loss, climate change, pollution, ocean acidification are all individually and collectively disrupting ocean ecosystems and threatening the provision of the benefits that we want and need. All of these are compromised in part because as we lose biodiversity, as we change biogeochemical cycles, as we lose habitats, we're modifying the systems that are providing those benefits. A lot of people have said, oh my gosh, it is just too much, is it hopeless? How in the world are we gonna fix all of those things? And in fact, there's no doubt about it. It is really daunting. The challenges are immense. And my message to you today though is despite the immensity of the challenge, there is encouraging progress that's underway. And it's partly because of this engagement. Scientists are working together with industry, they're working with communities, they're working to propose solutions, not just identify problems. And they're doing in ways that are very interdisciplinary and with partnerships to find solutions, to use new technologies and bring them to the fore. So let me make that more concrete and focus on these three problems that I told you we were gonna talk about. Overfishing, so I've got sort of problem and then solution. So overfishing is a major problem and fishery reform is the solution that is emerging. Fisheries as you know are incredibly important. A lot of people, when they see or hear the term food security, they think grain, livestock, you should also think seafood. Both wild capture and aquaculture are incredibly important, not only for people today, but people in the future. And indeed, a lot of research is showing that it's a lot lighter impact on the planet to get food from the sea, whether it's wild capture or aquaculture, than almost anything on land. So the future is gonna lie in the sea. We have not done a very good job historically of managing fisheries. We've seen serial depletion of one stock after another after another, and there's always been another new place to fish. As we ran out one place, we moved on. Well, there are no more places, there are no more new places to fish. We fish everywhere. It used to be the case that much of the ocean was a de facto no take area because it was too far away, too deep, too remote, too inaccessible. We've changed that. Technology has been amazing. We can fish everywhere. And this picture of the fraction of the stocks that the food and agricultural organization characterizes in different categories has changed dramatically over the last half century. It used to be that most in the 50s, almost all of the stocks were developing. None were over exploited, none were collapsed. Fast forward to today, we have some very significant overfishing, especially if you consider not just the industrial scale fisheries, but a lot of the small scale fisheries that are so critical for the livelihoods and for the health and well-being of many people in coastal countries in developing nations. What fishermen around the world are finding is that they have to fish harder and harder for fewer and fewer returns. This is not hopeless, and it doesn't mean fishing harder and harder is the answer. There's new science that has been analyzing different ways that people use to manage fisheries which has given us new insights. And in 2008, a paper was published by Chris Costello, Steve Gaines, and John Linem at UC Santa Barbara, and they analyzed over 11,000 fisheries globally and asked the simple question, does the way a fishery is managed matter in terms of whether it is sustainable or not? The blue line on this figure is the fraction of fisheries that use a fishery management tool that I will call secure fishing rights. So these are various, lots of different types of rights-based approaches to fisheries. This particular one in this analysis is one that is called an ITQ, Individual Transferable Quota. But just think about this as a secure fishing rights approach. And as you can see, those types of fisheries didn't really start to become very abundant until the mid-80s, and then they have become much more abundant in terms of the number of fisheries globally. The red line are the fraction of fisheries that never did have and still don't have any kind of a secure access approach. And those have been collapsing at an increasing rate. The fraction that collapsed has just plummeted. In contrast, those fisheries that were initially managed traditionally, but then switched over to a secure access, fishing access approach, is in the purple. And as you can see, it had the same initial trajectory as the other red line, but then has bounced around a bunch. For sure, there's a lot of variation. But on whole, on balance, secure fishing rights fisheries are less likely to collapse. So that was a major new finding that got a lot of attention. And a lot of government officials, a lot of managers said, whoa, maybe we need to think more about different approaches to fishery management. Maybe we need to think about fishing smarter, not harder, and tools like secure fishing rights, change incentives for fishermen. It allows fishermen to be good stewards of the resource, to have a stake in the future and be part of the decision-making process. And that's what I mean when I say fishing smarter, not harder. So flipping from traditionally management approaches to more new approaches that reward stewardship instead of punishing stewardship has been key. We, at NOAA, had, so the United States is a significant fishing nation, both in terms of what it catches and what it imports. And in 2006, there were some major revisions to the law that manages fisheries in the US. And those revisions had two key features and these features have totally transformed fisheries in the US. This is a good news story. One feature was no more aspirational, yeah, we're gonna try to end overfishing. You must end overfishing. There was a mandate and it had to be done by a certain date and if it wasn't, there were penalties and if you overfished one year, you had to underfish the next year. And so collectively, there was a new accountability, new timetables with teeth, an ecosystem focus, and very importantly, the quotas for each fishery management plan had to be, or the quotas had to be set only on the scientific information about what could be fish sustainably. It could not be tweaked by economic or social pleas for more quota because we needed it. It was only based on the fishery. Moreover, the quotas had to be set in a way that not only ended overfishing, but rebuilt the stock. And so that inevitably leads to some initial pain. Ending overfishing means you fish less. And so the fishermen that were involved in this and helped craft these fishery management plans knew that there was going to be a period of time of really belt tightening, but with the hope that it would get better. The second key feature was the ability for any of these fishery management plans to utilize these secure access approaches to fishery management instead of traditional ones. They didn't have to, they could if it was appropriate to the fishery. And this law was passed by Congress in part because the lawmakers who crafted it knew it was going to be painful, but they deferred the pain for quite a few years down the road and that pain came due during the time I was at NOAA. So I had to oversee some of the tough stuff of implementing this new law that required ending of overfishing, rebuilding of stocks. And so it was, I can tell you how extremely difficult it was to do this. However, it has completely transformed US fisheries after decades and decades of more and more overfishing. I'm going to compare two years for you, the year 2000 and the year 2016. The number of overfished stocks in the US was 92 in the year 2000. That was slashed to 38. So that's an amazing change of ending overfishing. It's not completely ended, but we are absolutely on the right course and that is partly due to those two key provisions. Even more impressive is the fact that a number of fisheries that had been previously significantly depleted and had to be closed because they were so low, they have not only been rebuilt, but now they can again be fished. And so that's what we call a rebuilt stock. It is completely recovered. And we went from zero in the year 2000 to 43 in the year 2016. That is an amazing turnaround. And it happened much faster than all the fishery models suggested might be the case. And it happened in part because the fishermen had new incentives in these secure fishing, secure rights programs. They had new incentives to work together instead of competing. They work together, they trade information about where the fishing is best. They work together in ways that have been truly transformative. So initially there was pain, but in the last few years there have been significant increases in catch, in value, and in jobs. And now about two thirds of the fish by volume that are caught in the U.S. are under some kind of secure fishing rights program. So this is pretty impressive transformation. And it says it is possible, it's not easy, but it is possible to end over fishing and recover fisheries. I cannot give enough credit to the fishermen that led this reform. The champions that really said we can't, we don't have a future unless we fix this, we have to be part of the solution, we want to be part of the solution. And we had an opportunity to recognize a number of the leaders in this at the White House at a special event, celebrating champions of change for sustainable seafood. And these three guys whom I've worked with closely and know well are really the key. The EU has also had very significant problems with over fishing and looked at what we were doing and based in part on that and in part based on other experiences they had past reformed their common fishery policy in 2013 and are now in the process of going through the tough work of implementing that policy. So the jury is still out on how successful that's going to be across your fingers. It's really important that they have as good an outcome as we did. So the point here is that scientists have been working with politicians, with NGOs and fishermen, and that those interactions in the right circumstances with the right policies and good science and good scientists have really been transformative. This is not a story just about developed countries. This is also happening in many developing countries. And in Belize, for example, in their shallow water reef fisheries, there has been significant overfishing, significant problems, really, really tough for fishermen and their families right on the edge. The local fishing communities partnered with governments and NGOs to implement a pilot project that was a different type of secure access program. It wasn't an ITQ program, it was called a TERF. And illegal fishing decreased by 60%. The reporting rates for catches increased. And fishermen were empowered and have been so pleased with this program that the country said, okay, we don't need any more pilots. The initial thing was let's do a bunch of pilots. They said, let's just adopt it for the whole country. So that happened in 2016. There are now a number of right space programs around the world, around 200 of these fisheries worldwide representing about 50 species. You can see the size of the bubbles represents the number of species in different countries. So you can see that it's developed as well as developing countries. This is not a panacea. Just adopting a different type of fishery management won't fix everything. Just having good science at the table will not fix everything. These are very, very complex problems. The fishery, it has to be, each program has to be designed and appropriate for each fishery. And there's a lot of nuance in this. However, it can be a very powerful tool if it's appropriate and if it's well used. Some of the same researchers, Chris Castello, Steve Gaines and their team of people at Santa Barbara and the team at Environmental Defense Fund have worked together to say, okay, we've got some experience with a number of fisheries. We know that on balance, the number of fisheries in the world is going, I mean, so I'm sorry. So this access is the percentage of healthy stocks and it is on the decline. This is where we are now. So it's going down. With business as usual, the future does not look very good. If, in fact, we could just wave a magic wand and have good fishery management in all programs, they went through the exercise of saying, how long would it take fishery by fishery to recover the fisheries that were depleted? How much would it cost and what would be the benefit? And they discovered, after doing lots and lots of modeling of individual fisheries all around the world, that on balance, most fisheries could be recovered after about 10 years, which is pretty darn quick. And yes, it costs something to do that, but the benefit outweighs the cost 10 to one. And if we could do that, if we could switch over, we could flip from that trajectory to this trajectory in terms of fisheries that were well managed. So when in place, secure fishing rights would have a huge benefit. And in fact, what they suggest from their modeling is that we could more than double the fish populations in the ocean while expanding by almost 30% the availability of wild fish as a food for a hungry planet and tripling the impact of fishing on the global economy. So there is a huge triple bottom line win according to their models of getting fisheries fixed. So the messages here are, it's not hopeless. We do, can reform, it's not easy. The upside of doing so is huge and it's well worth figuring out how to do it. This information has gotten the attention, these analyses have gotten the attention of a lot of government officials in a number of countries. When I was serving as the science envoy for the ocean dealing with high level officials in China, they were keenly interested in fisheries and in aquaculture because food security is a really important issue. And looking at that information that I just shared with you and that I had shared with them, we decided to embark on a joint effort of government and academics from both China and the US working together to think about new ways to manage fisheries, to do aquaculture, to do marine spatial planning in coastal areas. So that's one thing that's just being launched and I hope will be successful. It's a nice compliment to a lot of the net cap work that's underway here. Also Indonesia, another major fishing nation became really intrigued by these results and both China and Indonesia were two of the countries that stand, that have the biggest upside in terms of the biggest potential for recovering depleted fisheries and having more seafood to eat, more fish in the water to be parts of ocean ecosystems and economic benefit. And so the minister of fisheries and maritime affairs in Indonesia, Minister Susie, has been keenly interested in these and is now, has her team, the fishery managers, working with these scientists to try to refine their fishery models and think about fishery reforms. So the message with fisheries is that it's not easy but it's possible and scientists engaging and good new science is actually creating new opportunities to find solutions. The second problem I wanna focus on more briefly is illegal fishing and this is sort of the flip side. We've been talking about fishing that's legal and now we're gonna switch to illegal fishing which is a really bad problem and you see on the left here what happens quite frequently, all too frequently in today's ocean which is a fishing vessel, the one on the right is offloading its catch, its illegal catches are being offloaded to a refrigerated vessel, a reefer, that is also supplying the fishing vessel with its supplies and fuel so that it can stay out there and not have to come into port and be caught with an illegal catch. So these illegal boats can stay out there for long, long months at a time, often with slave labor, not always but often and so illegal fishing is a real significant problem. It's illegal, it's also unregulated and unreported is sort of lumped together as IUU and it is a problem that is on the order of up to as much as $23 billion a year so it's very, very significant loss to the legal fishing communities. There's been new political, new policies and new political will to tackle illegal fishing and new technology has been brought to bear. The Interpol has created a new international fishery crime unit. There's now a new platform for foreign ministers and heads of state to come together and talk about illegal fishing and other ocean issues, a platform called the Our Ocean Conference that John Kerry started when he was Secretary of State. And when I was at NOAA, we negotiated a new agreement through the Food and Agricultural Organization called the Port State Measures Agreement which says any countries that have signed this agreement will agree to not let illegal fishing vessels come into their ports. If they do, they can be seized, the ship, the crew can be seized, thrown in jail, the owners can be fined, the catch can be seized. And so there is now new political will to tackle what has been such an impossible problem that people just kind of weren't willing to think about it and that has changed very dramatically. Even more so because we have some new technology and new approaches to bring to the problem. Science, big data, technology, machine learning are all combining to do things like this global fishing watch which is a new program that was originally a partnership between Oceania SkyTruth and Google and help Mr. IT guy. My screen just went blank again. I don't know what Stanford's doing here but I've got this wireless visitor service message again. Oh, okay, fixed it, sorry. Got it. I don't know how to turn that off, sorry. So this is a really amazing program that's now spun off on its own and it takes advantage of the fact that all vessels of a certain size have to have transponders on them that tell other vessels where they are so they don't crash in the middle of the fog or the night. Each one of the points on these images is a fishing vessel and the machine learning comes in when you can track these vessels and know who's doing what, when, and where and figure out from their tracks whether they're fishing or not and whether they're fishing illegally or not. And I'm going to show you an animation so you can see what this actually looks like but I have to, so this is in the Pacific Ocean. I'm just going to describe it so you guys can look at both sides. On the far right, there's a circle, sort of a circle, some kind of polygon there. Circle by red, surrounded by red. That is part of the US exclusive economic zone around one of the Pacific remote islands. The same is true of the square that's up in the top. Right's dead in the middle of the screen. You can see a faint red line that is also a polygon that is around the Pacific, the Phoenix Island protected area which is part of the nation of Kiribati. And what I'm going to do is run this animation, I hope. And you can see when the area that was in this protected area was declared protected, then all the fishing vessels are moving away from the area and pretty much leaving it intact. So you can see which vessels are in there and they're not supposed to. And you can actually click on any one of those points and you can get the VIN, the identification number for the vessel and figure out who owns it, what it's doing. So there are new tools that are being brought to bear on both catching illegal fishing but also catching them in places where they're not supposed to be like protected areas. We've also seen benefits of combining these tools, fishery reform and addressing IUU. This is a paper that came out just two days ago in Nature Ecology and Evolution and it shows both the changes in harvest and the changes in profit through time for comparing the current situation which is in purple. So an open access fishery in Indonesia is going to be on the decline in a relatively quick period of time if nothing is done to reform fisheries or to tackle illegal fishing. The orangey, yellowy, sort of orangey peach color, maybe that's a better description, is if you tackle, let's do the teal next, the teal is if you have an illegal fishing policy, IUU policy and open access, you get a little bit more benefit but the best benefit comes if you tackle both, if you reform the fisheries and if you have a policy for IUU fishing which is what Indonesia does. And so this is a modeling exercise that really describes how these tools are complimentary and you need both of them. One final thing on this front and that is that there are more and more business leaders in the seafood companies that are paying attention to these issues and the University of Stockholm through the Stockholm Rosalind Center has formed a new really innovative partnership with the CEOs of the 10 biggest seafood companies in the world, both fishing and aquaculture. And these companies, these CEOs have formed something called Seafood Business for Ocean Stewardship and have publicly committed to being part of the solution, not part of the problem and they are beginning to work together to figure out how they are going to be tackling illegal fishing, traceability, slave labor, all of the issues that are sort of surrounding these. Still, jury is out on this as to how successful it will be but it's a really exciting new development. So on the IUU front, there's a lot of new stuff that's happening and a problem that used to be thought of as being impossible is actually being tackled. Boats are being confiscated, catches are being confiscated. It's harder and harder to get away with doing bad stuff. Switching to the third and final example, loss of safe havens. I mentioned from the outset that it used to be the case that most of the ocean was a de facto protected area. Now very little of it is and that's a problem in terms of protecting biodiversity, protecting healthy oceans. We absolutely need fishery reform but we also need some safe havens and those safe havens are what we call marine reserves which are fully protected from any extractive activities fishing, mining, drilling, et cetera. There is one big high seas common that represents almost 60% of the surface area of the ocean. The rest of it, 42% is in the territorial waters of individual countries and most of the action on the marine reserve front is in the country's exclusive economic zones and what we have seen through time is after decades and decades of NGOs saying we need protected areas, we need protected areas and not much happening, all of a sudden in the last decade there has been a very sharp increase in the area in marine protected areas more broadly and that's the histograms on the upper, the blue is all MPAs and the green are those that are strongly or fully protected. Those are the marine reserves and those are the ones that have the most benefit. So that increase is due in part to new science being synthesized, coalesced, developed and communicated to people in more user friendly terms such as this series of booklets on marine reserves of the world. And these are just a few of the results but we know from a lot of science that has been done that marine reserves protect biodiversity, they're actually great at that. There is an abundance of information that when you stop fishing in an area, mining and drilling, things get big, they get abundant and that abundance spills over to adjacent areas outside. We know that one of the most important things that happens in a protected area is that individuals can get really big whether it's a fish or a crab or whatever and big means lots more young. This shows a European sea bass and you see on the upper left, there's one that's 40 centimeters and that 40 centimeter fish makes on average 230,000 young. If you let that 40 centimeter fish grow to 80 centimeters on the far right, that fish produces 3.3 million young. So a little bit bigger size means lots more young and that's the future of those populations. So that is the future to recover depleted fisheries, to recover areas inside a reserve and that's one of the most important features of a marine reserve is letting things get big. Those young can be transported outside, we know that happens and have data to show it and if you have a very large protected area, you can protect multiple habitats and lots of fish and other invertebrates spend time in different habitats during their life history. We also know, also critically important, that protected areas can restore the ecological interactions within a reserve. By restoring the top predators, they can regain control over the trophic level down from them and there are cascading trophic interactions that are critically important so having more balanced ecosystems and more resilient ones. We also know that marine reserves can buffer against mismanagement mistakes and uncertainty and we're finding increasingly that protected areas are less likely to change if there is an environmental change and they are faster to recover if there is an adverse event like a bleaching event and so people are increasingly calling marine reserves climate reserves, thinking of this not just as a tool for conservation but a climate adaptation tool that should be added to the toolbox. The countries of the world have committed to protecting 10% of the global ocean by 2020 but that's in any kind of marine protected area. We are far from that but we are making progress. So the good news is that a number of countries have seized on the opportunity from 2015 to 2017. Quite a few countries made big announcements mostly at the our ocean conference about setting aside significant fractions of their territorial waters. This has often involved extensive consultation between a government and indigenous people such as in Easter Island, the Rapa Nui. People really led and participated actively and voted in favor of creating a new Rahui around their area. And a very innovative new development in seychelles brokered by the nature conservancy was the first in the ocean debt for nature swap where in exchange for relieving foreign debt the country of seychelles would agree to set aside 30% of its EEZ exclusive economic zone as protected and create a climate adaptation fund to do climate adaptation both in the ocean and on land and do marine spatial planning for the whole EEZ. They're now also issuing blue bonds. And I think this is a really nice example of a very innovative approach to combine financing with conservation. When President Obama came into office only 5% of the US exclusive economic zone was protected by the time he left that had been increased over fourfold to 23%. And he did that using his executive powers under the Antiquities Act to create marine national monuments. Those may be at risk. We are working hard to keep these, but time will tell. And I mentioned again that this new tool global fishing watch can actually help patrol these areas not just deal with IUU fishing. And finally, most of the protected areas that exist are within countries waters. There is one very, very large one in the Antarctic in the Southern Ocean called the Ross Sea Marine Protected Area that was agreed upon by 25 governments who had to all agree to do this through one of the regional fishery management organizations. So in conclusion for the marine reserves part of this we've seen powerful science and partnerships, new political leadership and new social norms resulting in an order of magnitude increase in strongly protected areas globally. That's a far cry from the 30% that scientists say is probably needed. So we have a lot of work to do on that front but there's increasing momentum. Marine reserves may be especially important in providing greater resilience against climate change but there is still very active resilience on the part of the extractive user community and the public is pretty much unaware of this issue. So we've talked about examples from the ocean. I wanna pivot very quickly to lessons learned and hope. We've talked about three examples and I wanna emphasize across all three of these how important it is to think about the role of incentives in changing behavior, behavior of individuals, behavior of corporations, behavior of governments, either economic incentives or social incentives, changing social norms, focusing on personal values and across all of these examples there are I think is a powerful message that is emerging that focusing on incentives is a really powerful way to think about how do we affect the kinds of changes that are needed. The right incentives can convert a vicious cycle of unsustainable practices to a virtuous cycle of sustainable practices. So in short, I think there are a lot of reasons to be hopeful despite the overwhelming daunting nature of the challenges we've seen science-based policy reforms. It is possible to end overfishing and rebuild depleted stocks. There's increasing importance of the recognition to focus on incentives and get them right. There's a big upside to fixing fisheries. There's serious attention to ending IUU fishing and there are increases in marine reserves and there is increasing momentum to do that. So my bottom line to you is that solutions do exist. They're not at the scale that we need, they're not being taken up as fast as we need, especially in light of the magnitude of the challenge and some of the biggest threats are just lack of awareness that there is even a problem or that there are solutions. And so there's a lot of work to be done and a lot of opportunity. So I posed the question to you, can we use the ocean without using it up? I would say that if the message here is yes, we can. And it's my hope that we can recover the bounty and use it wisely. And so I turned to my bottom line at the top of my time. Civil society and governments need science. We have strong evidence that science can help drive change and that all of you are in positions in your various roles to be working together to make some of these changes happen. Now is the time to really up our game. Now is the time to really get engaged and to build on what we've learned, accelerate process. And that I think will give us hope for science and society both. Thank you very much. Well, let's start there. So we only have time for one question, perhaps, and then we have a reception. We can talk informally. Where you can talk informally with Jane. One question, make it a good one. No pressure. Over here. There's a mic right here. Hi, hello, my name is Andre and I work with the African Development Bank. And thank you very much for this very hopeful and positive message. I'm just gonna give a very short anecdote. Not too long ago I came across in Europe of a civil servant working actually for a tax authority, higher education and all that. And he seemed to believe on flat earth. And aside from the initial shock that I had, what struck me most was that there's a complete erosion of trust in science, in institutions, and it's a complete disbelief that I find in a certain way is also what reflects our society currently. So my take is, and I fully support your point of communication and evolving science and putting science at the base. But at the same time, it seems that there's a complete lack of trust. And how can we overcome that lack of trust and how in your experience we find that we can regain some worthiness, some trustworthiness into our work? Thank you. So that's a great question. And I think it's one that a lot of us have been very cognizant of in this post-truth world, the populist movements that are going on around the country, around the world. And I think that part of the reason that we are having a lot of distrust is that some science in academia has not bothered to sort of to be transparent about what we do or how we do it. And there's been a lot of science done in the Ivory Tower that has not really engaged citizens, engaged policy makers. And I think one of the ways, so there are complex social factors that are underpinning a lot of what's going on. I don't wanna not recognize the complexity of these issues. And there are a lot of things that are driving this. However, I think that there is an opportunity by doing the kind of not just communication, but engagement with communities, with industry, with government officials and co-creating knowledge because then people are part of the process and they trust it, they believe in it. And there has been a lot of tension over the years between fishermen and fishery managers or scientists because the fishermen say, these guys don't know what they're talking about, they go out and sample an area and they don't even know where the fish are, they just sample all over the place. We know where the fish are, they're over here. If they wanna sample fish, go over there. And they don't understand a sampling protocol. And so there's been a complete sort of disconnect between some fishermen and some scientists. And in fact, many of the programs that have gotten over that have been fishermen working with scientists, co-designing, sampling, and then so there's increased sharing of information in both directions and then trusting the information that comes out the other end. So I think we need more of that. Engagement is not the answer to everything, but I think it would help a lot in some of the challenges that we have that are above and beyond what I had time to talk about. So thank you all very much. Appreciate it. Thank you.