The United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goal 14 – Life below water – aims at conserving and sustainably using the oceans, which represent 70% of the Earth’s surface. This goal is connected to the global target to expand protected areas to 30% of the planet by 2030, focusing on areas that are particularly important for biodiversity, such as coral reefs, on which people living in coastal areas depend to survive. This is particularly the case for New Caledonia and Fiji – two archipelagos that are located in the Pacific Ocean – where most of the population lives in coastal areas and relies on some of the largest barrier reefs in the world. Pacific Island countries and territories – in particular their Indigenous peoples who see themselves as the custodians of the ocean for the general good, their sovereign rights, and their holistic knowledge – are increasingly recognized as integral for achieving such ambitious conservation objectives. 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. SOCPacific2R explores these social-ecological ‘keystone places’ and ‘communication zones’ that have hardly been investigated by natural and social sciences. Through its empirical focus on New Caledonia and Fiji, and based on a trusted and interdisciplinary French-German-Pacific partnership, the project 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 these interrelated objectives and associated capacity-building 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. 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. Therefore, this project will integrate both a conventional and a more-than-human approach to ethnography into interdisciplinary dialogues, while using methods and dialogic spaces to more directly and actively engage various stakeholder groups throughout the research process.

Pacific Ocean Pathways in support of sustainable development (PACPATH) aims at establishing cost-effective, efficient and sustainable transdisciplinary processes, methods and networks allowing stakeholders as scientists, public officers and citizens of the Pacific Islands to share common objectives and actions in order to achieve environmental sustainability considering SDG14, and its interlinkage to all other 16 SDGs, particularly SDG 13 and SDG 15. Stakeholders rely on sound science, targeted expertise, and reliable data-based information for risked-informed decision making, which however needs to be better targeted and co-constructed with local communities and knowledge-holders. In-line with major objectives of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, PACPATH will foster the development of participative and transformative process to build a Pacific stakeholder network drawing on two pilot sites, Fiji and New Caledonia, examining the impacts of climate change and other stressors on the ocean environment and ecosystem services, and their consequences for society, economy, and attainment of the SDGs while considering different aspects and their interactions for the physical, social-ecological and socio-economic ocean for a coconstructed sustainable ocean stewardship.

The South Pacific region represents a unique context in which local communities and their political representatives are increasingly committed to integrated management of marine resources and spaces after a predicted dissolution of related community-based activities in the 1970s. This holds especially true for fisheries, the main field of activity in this oceanscape and a critical component of local livelihoods, national and regional economies, and global fish supplies. Fisheries remain one of the most important concerns on the national and regional policy agendas in the Pacific. Recent studies have started to take into account the multi-faceted aspects of Pacific fisheries by articulating ecological and economic perspectives. Our project aims at broadening this endeavour by re-embedding coastal and oceanic fisheries in their wider context and by exploring the large web of socio-cultural, geopolitical and policy connections within which fishing practices occur. For this, we will conduct an interdisciplinary and multi-level analysis across diverse scales and dimensions of fisheries, fisheries management and marine governance in the South Pacific region, including local perceptions and practices, global changes and drivers, and national and regional management frameworks and strategies. This analysis will focus on three study areas: New Caledonia, Vanuatu and Fiji where fieldwork periods will be conducted. Three thematic areas will be at the core of the project’s cross-sectional investigations: 1) An environmental anthropology assessment of social values of places and resources in connection with offshore and inshore fisheries; 2) A socio-political ecology perspective on interwoven fisheries and conservation issues within marine protected areas; 3) A policy analysis of the inclusion of fisheries in marine spatial planning. The project outcomes will be five-fold: 1) The production of policy briefs to be disseminated to regional stakeholders on these three thematic areas, with a spot-light on the neglected ‘sea of connections’ in which fisheries are embedded. 2) The production of knowledge exchange pathways between local marine resource users, local students and other stakeholders of South Pacific fisheries via, for instance, local perceptions of fishing activities in a broader context of natural resource uses and values, conservation initiatives and issues, and conflicts related to boundaries. 3) The contribution to the advancement of cross-cutting knowledge in the multi-faceted field of fisheries management and marine governance. 4) The participation in the endeavour to build new forms of integrative governance of the sea including all stakeholders, and in which both Pacific countries and territories and the European Union are closely working together. 5) The strengthening of the existing working ties between the French and German partners, to complement respective national research landscapes.

Tropical pelagic biodiversity plays an essential role for the food security and incomes of many coastal developing countries, thus calling for its sustainable use. It is currently subject to major stressors from human activities and climate change. Due to its sparseness, remoteness and vastness, the open ocean is difficult to access and monitor. As a consequence, the diversity trends and status of pelagic species still remain poorly assessed. The project aims at filling this knowledge gap, by developing monitoring platforms to observe the open ocean and its biodiversity in collaboration with fishers. At the core of the project is the fact that thousands of platforms already exist in the open ocean and are regularly maintained by fishers: the so-called Fish Aggregating Devices (FADs). FADs are artificial buoys or rafts deployed offshore by fishers to increase their chances of finding fish. They exploit the behavior of many tropical species, which associate and form multi-specific aggregations around floating objects. The project builds upon this concept and aims at using FADs as scientific platforms to access the open ocean and monitor its pelagic biodiversity. The project focuses on three main study areas located in the Indian ocean: Mayotte (French overseas department), the Maldives and Indonesia. The methodology employed relies on the combination of innovative monitoring techniques conducted at FADs, ranging from molecular ecology (eDNA, metabarcoding), underwater acoustics (echosounders and bioacoustics) as well as underwater videos, supported by the use of artificial intelligence for species identification. The project also employs a citizen-science approach that builds upon the traditional and ecological knowledge of fishers, empowering fishers to promote community-based ocean monitoring and ocean sustainability. Furthermore, more conventional existing data, such as catch data, is considered and harmonized with the new data collected to produce relevant biodiversity indicators. The knowledge on pelagic biodiversity produced by the project’s interdisciplinary scientific team is the platform on which all knowledge-holders exchange, learn and create close connections to promote the long-term and multi-faceted use of such monitoring schemes. Because the pelagic resource is, by nature, distributed over wide ranges going beyond national borders, the project has an intrinsic transnational dimension. It is relevant for policy-making and society, since it aims at providing new knowledge for the sustainable use of pelagic biodiversity. Given the importance of pelagic resources for food security, their sustainable use is a global societal challenge in line with the United Nations Agenda for Sustainable Development (Goal 14). The results of the project can support several end-users, from fishers (by improving the sustainability of their fishing practices) to international policy makers, such as the tuna Regional Fisheries Management Organizations.

On coastal reefs (0-50 m depth), perhaps more than anywhere in the world, natural and human systems share a history of strong dependence that must be taken into account to maintain, on one side, the long-term human development and well-being, and, on the other side, biodiversity. This biodiversity translates directly into services. Reef fishes support the nutritional and economic needs of people in many poor countries while hosting the major part of marine life on Earth (25%). However world's reefs are severely over-fished or have degraded habitats. Avoiding or escaping this negative spiral and identifying the most vulnerable reef social-ecological systems on Earth are among the major issues that scientists and managers are facing today. The project aims to move beyond the typical over-simplified ‘human impacts’ storyline and focus on uncovering new solutions based on a prospective and integrated modelling approach of reef social-ecological systems at the global scale with three objectives: 1.Quantifying five key services provided by reef fishes: (i) biomass production providing livelihoods, (ii) nutrient cycling that affects productivity, (iii) regulation of the carbon cycle that affects CO2 concentration, (iv) cultural value that sustains well-being tourism activities and (v) nutritional value insuring food security. 2.Determine the conditions (socioeconomic and environmental) under which these ecosystem services are currently maintained or threatened. Based on a global database of fish surveys over more than 5,000 reefs that encompass wide gradients of environments, human influences (fishing impact), and habitats, we will estimate the boundaries or thresholds beyond which these ecosystem services may collapse. 3.Predict the potential futures of these services and social-ecological systems under various global change scenarios. Using multiple integrated scenarios (human demography, economic development and climate change) and predictive models we will simulate the dynamics of shallow reef ecosystems and their ability to deliver services during the next century.