Abstract
Capacity building efforts in Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are indispensable for the achievement of both individual and collective ocean-related 2030 agenda priorities for sustainable development. Knowledge of the individual capacity building and research infrastructure requirements in SIDS is necessary for national and international efforts to be effective in supporting SIDS to address nationally-identified sustainable development priorities. Here, we present an assessment of human resources and institutional capacities in SIDS United Nations (UN) Member States to help formulate and implement durable, relevant, and effective capacity development responses to the most urgent marine issues of concern for SIDS. The assessment highlights that there is only limited, if any, up-to-date information publicly available on human resources and research capacities in SIDS. A reasonable course of action in the future should, therefore, be the collection and compilation of data on educational, institutional, and human resources, as well as research capacities and infrastructures in SIDS into a publicly available database. This database, supported by continued, long-term international, national, and regional collaborations, will lay the foundation to provide accurate and up-to-date information on research capacities and requirements in SIDS, thereby informing strategic science and policy targets towards achieving the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs) within the next decade.
Highlights
In September 2015, all 193 United Nations (UN) Member States adopted an agenda for sustainable development, including 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as an over-arching policy framework through to the year 2030 [1]
According to the UN/DESA brief Nr. 64 [31], the projected Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rate of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) will likely shrink by 4.7% in 2020, compared to a global contraction of around 3.0%, which will exceed the economic impact of some natural disasters, such as tropical hurricanes
The economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic will be devastating for many of the SIDS with long lasting effects, which will have major implications for 1) withstanding future natural disasters, and 2) achieving global and national targets within the 2030 agenda and the SDGs [31]. This pandemic underscores the extreme vulnerability of SIDS to global economic shocks and further highlights the need of SIDS for international assistance and cooperation
Summary
In September 2015, all 193 United Nations (UN) Member States adopted an agenda for sustainable development, including 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as an over-arching policy framework through to the year 2030 [1]. It is commonly recognized that SIDS have a need for more tertiary education in environmentally relevant fields, technical expertise, training, access to tools, new technology, ocean information, ocean literacy, monitoring networks, data products, and infrastructure and logistics [13] Knowledge about their current states of national research capacities and infrastructures and their associated individual capacity building requirements is still scarce. This study focuses primarily on the identification of marine environmental capacities with particular attention to nuclear and isotopic science, as well as inorganic and organic geochemistry facilities This groundwork is important to ensure that the ocean science community, as well as national and international funding and development agencies, implement relevant and effective capacity development responses in SIDS UN Member States in the coming years to improve SIDS’s conditions for sustainable development of the ocean. The SIDS group comprises 38 UN Members and 20 Non-UN Members or Associate Members of Regional Commissions (Figure 1 and Table S2)
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