 Good afternoon. My name is Katya Popova from National Oceanography Center, UK. And I will present some results today on the connectivity between Aries-Bion National Jurisdiction and the Coastal Zone. And first of all, I would like to acknowledge my co-authors, David Vazdan and Warwick Sauer from Rhodes University in South Africa and Essam Mohamed from International Institute for Environment and Development. Ocean ecological connectivity is a very complex natural phenomenon which links various components of marine ecosystem in time and space. And in our case, we can see the linkages between Aries-Bion National Jurisdiction and Coastal Zone. So ecological connectivity happens with two main mechanisms. First of all, it's active or migratory connectivity. Lots of marine species migrate via large distances. And also there is passive connectivity which spreads around ocean larvae, which is nearly passive substance, part of its life stages. And this passive connectivity happens via very energetic ocean currents. So let's have a look at migratory connectivity, first of all. So this map shows the compilation of the recent data on migratory marine species such as tuna, sharks, turtles. So the main things to take from this plot is that migratory species are quite ubiquitous in the ocean and they do straddle both high seas and coastal zones. What about ocean circulation connectivity? So this is a NEMA model, model of the ocean circulation which you see right now is surface ocean currents with a white color show very areas of very fast currents and blue is more quiet areas. So this is just ocean velocity. To understand how tightly areas are connected, we use Lagrangian approach. So what we do, we take this ocean model, ocean currents and we begin to drop imaginary little floats like you can see here those white floats. We drop them into our modeled ocean as a virtual reality and we drag how long it takes them to connect one areas to another. So if we for example want to be on the coast somewhere here, we can use trajectory of this flow to calculate where our water on the coastal zone came from and how long it took it to get there. And we did this for all maritime least developed countries around the world. And what we found is that some coastlines of some countries are much more connected to the high seas than the others. So which are the most high seas connected least developed countries in the world? Well, in the Indian Ocean, in the near and Somalia. So what you see on the picture is what we call a circulation footprint. So imagine that we are on a coastal zone of Somalia and someone begin to throw imaginary floats in the high seas and that floats go with the currents and some of them begin to arrive. To Somalia coastlines. So colors show how long it takes to the float to reach from high seas to the coastal zone. So when you're in this purple area, connection takes about one month. So when you're in a red area connection to the coastal zone to Somalia, Somalia take around six months. So in the Indian Ocean and it is Somalia and Tanzania, which are most connected countries. And in general, Indian Ocean is the most connected ocean in the world due its very, very energetic and seasonally reverse and monsoon circulation. This Kiribati with a footprint stretching on the both sides of the ocean. Atlantic, the most connected country is Liberia. So the same way is not all countries are made equal in their connections to the high seas. The same way, not all areas in high sea equally connected. So we calculated in this plot how many countries each area in the high seas are connected to on the time scale of six months. And what you see is really kind of bright red areas. It's the connection is to seven to 10 countries and blue areas is for one or two countries. So the most connected areas of the high seas to the coastal zones of least developed countries would be areas in the Atlantic areas in the Indian Ocean, especially over high seas part of the masculine plateau, Bengal Bay and what we call don't hold of the Pacific Island. That's areas between exclusive economic zone, which is high seas here. Areas beyond national jurisdictions have tight ecological connectivity to the coastal waters. So high seas are not those remote and consequential areas that tightly connected the influence and coastal zone influence in their community. However, the level of connectivity and exposure of the countries to activities of ABNJ significantly varies between countries and region. And some coastal states are more impacted by human activities in the areas beyond national jurisdictions than others. But the most important conclusion is that current debate on criteria to identify marine managed and marine protected areas in the areas beyond national jurisdiction often focus on the ecological and biological significance of this area in question. So what we argue in this study is that criteria for establishing marine protected areas in the high seas must include potential socio-economic benefits for vulnerable coastal community, not only affected by this area, but downstream of this area. So it is importance of the downstream zone of influence via ecological connectivity is the main conclusion of the publications can be found in the following publications, which are shown on the screen right now. It's a recent paper in marine policy and ecological connectivity between areas beyond national jurisdiction and coastal waters. And also in a policy brief so far, yet so closed ecological connectivity between areas beyond national jurisdictions and territorial waters. Both publications are in open access using links below. You can get their full texts. Thank you very much and please ask if you have any questions.