Co-creating coastal sustainability goals and indicators

Summary

Indicators can be powerful tools to measure progress towards achieving societal goals, and many indicators have been developed for sustainability goals nationally and internationally. When indicators are developed solely through top-down approaches without engaging local knowledge, they often fall short of capturing local perceptions and concerns relevant to decision-making. The aim of this project was to co-create a Coastal Barometer and its component indicators, together with local knowledge-holders and communities, using the Ocean Health Index as a framework. As a first step, local knowledge-holders from six communities dispersed across Northern Norway were invited to articulate local sustainability goals and the required knowledge for eight broad topics pertaining to global OHI goals: small-scale fisheries, food production, sense of place, tourism, food production, clean waters, carbon storage and economy and livelihoods. In this paper, our main focus is the co-design phase of the Coastal Barometer, namely eliciting sustainability goals. We thus, present locally desired sustainability goals and sub-goals and the process of eliciting these goals. We also include suggestions from local knowledge-holders on how to reach these goals (i.e. proposed management measures), along with researchers’ assessment of data availability (part of the co-production process) for developing indicators to measure progress towards these goals. Finally, we discuss the benefits and challenges of co-developing sustainability goals and indicators with local knowledge-holders. We conclude that co-design can increase the quality of sustainability assessments by enriching the view of coastal sustainability. This knowledge can subsequently be used to align indicators with local sustainability goals as well as to the local context where the indicators will be applied.