A discussion on an index to assess the health and benefits of the global ocean, Halpern et al. 2012, by Georges Laguerre, CIAM 6117, UPR Río Piedras

1. An Index to Assess the health and
benefits of the global ocean
Authors: Benjamin S. Halpern…
,
Georges Laguerre

2. INTRODUCTION
• The Ocean plays a critical role supporting human in: providing food, livelihoods
and recreational opportunities to regulating the global climate,
•Anthropogenic impact: such as overfishing, coastal development and pollution
have altered marine ecosystems and eroded their capacity to provide benefits now
and in the future.
•Yet people benefit directly or indirectly from these activities by extracting food ,
visiting coastal areas, making a living, or continuing old traditions .

3. Aim
• To create an index to measure and monitor
the health of coupled human-ocean systems.

4. Significance of the study
Just as traders use various stock indices to monitor the global economy,
micro-analyzing each blip, a team of nearly 50 scientists from many
disciplines is designing an analogous tool to track the health of the
world’s oceans and the implications for human well-being. (Dr. Halpern)
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com

5. Methods
• To realize the study they create an index
method.
I: Index Score
α: Goal specific weight
Ii: Average value of present and
likely future status for each goal.

6. Results
Conceptual framework for calculating the index

7. Map of index and
individual goal scores per country

9. conclusion
•
•
•
•
The index score 0-100
The index global score is 60
5% of the countries >70
32% scores <50

10. Discussion
• Do you really think that the index scores are
correlated with the human development
index?
• If more goals were considered how do you
think the index scores would be affected?

11. THANK YOU