Resident academic within the Department of Geosciences of the Faculty of Science Prof. Alan Deidun has recently been nominated by the Ministry for Foreign and European Affairs (MFEA) as an expert the within the Regular Process for Global Reporting and Assessment of the State of the Marine Environment (WEOG).
The Regular Process, including Socioeconomic Aspects (Regular Process), is a global mechanism established after the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development to regularly review the environmental, economic and social aspects of the world’s oceans, both current and foreseeable.
It is accountable to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), and its purpose is to contribute to the strengthening of the regular scientific assessment of the state of the marine environment, in order to enhance the scientific basis for policymaking.
The main output of the first cycle (2010-2015) of the Regular Process was the First Global Integrated Marine Assessment (the first World Ocean Assessment, WOA I), which produced a baseline for the assessment of the state of the marine environment, including socioeconomic aspects, at the global level.
The main output of the second cycle (2016-2020) is the second World Ocean Assessment (WOA II), due to be published in 2021, which extends to evaluating trends and identifying gaps. Prof. Deidun, Malta’s Ocean Governance Ambassador, features as a co-author on two different chapters of the WOA II (Chapter 6B – benthic invertebrates and Chapter 25 – Invasive Species) and was a speaker in August 2018 at a Regular Process meeting organised by the DOALAS (Division for Ocean Affairs and Law of the Sea) in Malta in preparation for the drafting of the WOA II document.
The production of such landmark assessments was led by the Group of Experts of the Regular Process, which is an interdisciplinary expert group composed of up to five experts from each regional group. The tasks of the Group of Experts are many and varied, and the lessons learned from the second cycle note that fully populating the Group of Experts, while ensuring an adequate balance of expertise, is essential to the success of the third cycle.
The Group of Experts of the Regular Process is an interdisciplinary, geographically diverse expert group, responsible for the production of the substantive, scientific content of the outputs of the Regular Process, and providing scientific guidance and expertise in other activities to be carried out under the Regular Process. In particular, the Group of Experts has been responsible for developing and leading the production of the World Ocean Assessments. Its members serve in an independent, personal capacity.
The third cycle (2021-2025) will have three main outputs:
- assessment(s) of the state of the marine environment, including socioeconomic aspects;
- support for and interaction with other ocean-related intergovernmental processes, including through, among others, the production of a series of brief documents outlining specific policy-relevant information from WOA II;
- capacity-building, including a capacity-building programme aiming to develop the capacities of States in strengthening the ocean science-policy interface at the national, regional and global levels.
