Environmental Stewardship

Environmental stewardship is the act of responsible use and protection of the natural environment through conservation and sustainable practices to enhance ecosystem resilience and human well-being. It is an action-oriented framework intended to foster sustainability of a rapidly changing planet. Three strategies of environmental stewardship include reducing the magnitude, exposure and sensitivity to known stresses, promoting proactive policies of change, and evading and escaping unsustainable social-ecological traps.

DBCP promote technologies and practices that reduce the environmental impact of our operations. The specific actions of the DBPC strategy include:

• The establishment of a DBCP Task Team focusing on our environmental impacts. This shall include the promotion of best practices, serving as a focal point for DBCP environmental stewardship matter, and liaise with other national and international organizations, such as WMO, IOC and GOOS to mainstream environmental stewardship;
• Work with ocean observing network partners to baseline and continually review and minimize our environmental footprint;
• Collect feedback from member and report on plans, actions and progress to reduce environmental impact.

The following list are the UN and global instruments on environmental stewardship related to the ocean observation:

• The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea regulating the Protection and Preservation of the Marine Environment (Part XII) and Marine scientific research (Part XIII).
• The UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), Goals No 14 Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development explaining the urgent actions needed to safeguard the planet's largest ecosystem.
• UNEP report on Marine Litter provides an overview of legislation that countries have implemented to tackle marine litter, focusing in particular on upstream solutions.
• UNEP's Minamata Mercury Convention highlights a ban on new mercury mines, the phase-out of existing ones, the phase-out and phase-down of mercury use in a number of products and processes, control measures on emissions to air and on releases to land and water.
• International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL)
• Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter

The following list are the National and regional Environmental Impact Assessments on environmental stewardship:

• NOAA NDBC Programmatic Environmental Assessment for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• Argo Program Environmental Issues and the Argo Array

Good practices on environmental stewardship in the network:

• Argo’s environmental impact
• Euro Argo's poster on Environmental Impact of Argo Floats
• Euro Argo's pamflet on What are the Environmental Cost and Benefit of Argo Floats
• NOAA's Environmental impact assessment on Expendable Bathythermographs (XBT)