A preliminary assessment of the indicators for Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14 “Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development”

The SDGs are intended to address sustainable development processes in both developed and developing countries, and to facilitate action at all levels and with all actors, including government, civil society, the private sector and the science community to strengthen the capacity of the State to achieve the desired outcomes. The SDG 14 “Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development” covers, among other features, economic pressures on the marine environment, as well as the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and coastal communities since they are particularly impacted by the economic pressures and dependent on the oceans in socio-economic terms. This paper reviews the rational for the SDG 14, as well as the framework for the SDG 14 indicators including (i) the basic concepts, i.e. the role of uncertainty, irreversibility and thresholds in the marine context, the multidimensionality of the SDG 14 indicators, and how to ensure effective SDG 14 monitoring and implementation through SMART SDG 14 targets; (ii) synergies and trade-offs among the SDG 14 targets and between SDG 14 and other SDGs targets, and how to track progress on policy coherence at the national level; (iii) synergies between SDG 14 indicators, and ocean-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 7 and Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) targets and indicators; and (iv) the role of non-traditional sources of data such as big data. In addition, some preliminary indicators for the SDG 14 at the global and national scales (France) are also explored. As a result of this analysis, some areas for future research in the framework of SDG 14 indicators are proposed, i.e. building on the frontiers of ocean science, the development of innovative approaches for data collection, the development of common approaches in valuing marine ecosystem services and national accounting, the provision of incentives for best practice and peer-learning, the harmonisation of measurement methodologies and the selection of SDG 14 indicators according to the geographical level of intervention.