GUEST SPEAKER : LUC VAN HOOF

Luc Van HOOF will present a plenary session named:

Facing the future: can foresight studies help to integrate science?

“Feeding the world population by 2050 (and providing them with sustainable energy and jobs) is one of the main challenges of today; especially in the light of the scarcity of fresh water a marine or blue revolution is needed to feed 10 billion people by then. The marine environment surely offers a lot of opportunities, but the seas and oceans and the marine ecosystems are also under threat of unsustainable uses.

Central question in this is how we can attain sustainable use of ecosystem services, including the governance of marine and coastal areas. In the world of today the role and position of science in this process is rapidly changing. In order to meet the challenge of the future we need a more applied form of science in a trans-disciplinary way in which knowledge is being produced together with stakeholders in a complex field of responsibilities. So not only is an interdisciplinary mode of producing science of importance, the more crucial issue is that of entering a mode of co-creation of knowledge together with stakeholders such as the industry, NGOs, policy makers and civic society.

In his Keynote address Luc van Hoof will examine how the method of foresight studies can be used to reach a multi-disciplinary/interdisciplinary and participatory process of formulating answers to the challenges of the future. He will base his analysis on the experiences he gained in two participatory foresight studies in the field of fisheries, aquaculture and sea food processing he facilitated in recent years: the 2007 FEUFAR project and the 2014 COFASP project; and the development of five scenarios for alternative governance models for regional cooperation under the ODEMM project in 2014.”

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Luc van Hoof (MSc fisheries and economics 1988, PhD Marine Governance 2010) has built up experience as a fisheries economist and management consultant during 15 years in various African countries. Since 2000 he has been involved in European and Dutch fisheries research, both as head of the Fisheries Research Group of the WUR Agricultural Economics Research Institute and as head of the Seafood and Aquaculture group of IMARES. He has been involved in several activities concerning Governance in Fisheries Management, both at the level of stakeholder involvement in the policy process as in scientific support to policy development. In addition he has been coordinating several European studies focusing on the possible developments of the European Fisheries Management System especially on rights based management systems.

Currently his main task lies in developing a framework for integrated marine management, governance and marine spatial planning.  He is employed by the Institute for Marine Resources and Ecosystem Studies (IMARES) in the Netherlands. He is working at the WUR Environmental Policy Group on Institutional change in Fisheries Management. Luc van Hoof is member of the board of MARE, Centre for Marine Research, and is Executive Secretary of EFARO, the European Fisheries and Aquaculture Research Organisation. As member of both EFARO, MARE, EAFE, the EU Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries (STECF) and observer of the EU North Sea Regional Advisory Committee, he is well known among the stakeholders of the fisheries scientific, management and fisheries sector community.

He has been part of and coordinated several EU funded research projects among which the FEUFAR (2008) and COFASP (2014) project which focused on developing participatory scenarios to develop the research agenda for Europe to permit exploitation and farming of aquatic resources set against the context of key challenges and risks for meeting sustainability requirements. He also coordinated the MESMA project which developed tools for the monitoring and evaluation of Marine Spatial Plans.