ABSTRACT
The world is increasingly looking to the sea for drinking water, energy, food, and strategic minerals. How this bodes for humanity’s – and the planet’s – future is open to question, as the global population is expected to reach about 9 billion by 2050 and attendant demands for food and energy will be nearly double what they are today. Intense conflicts over scarce surface water and aquifer water resources have already started, and the spectacular growth of energy-demanding desalination in response to water scarcity threatens access to and availability of seafood resources. At the same time, offshore energy development displaces fishers from productive fishing grounds, and catastrophic oil spills harm or even shut down fisheries. To date, siloed thinking about how to manage marine resources has resulted in uncoordinated fisheries, energy, mining, and marine use policies that do not allow the consideration of trade-offs and do not capitalize on the synergies that taking a nexus approach would provide.
