Making the best of our marine resources

The launch of the marine pilot project by the Malta Council for Science and Technology (MCST) is another chapter in the highly successful eforesee foresight scheme.

Led by Aldo Drago, from the IOI-Malta Operational Centre of the University of Malta, the marine pilot project is run in collaboration with the MAMA-MedGOOS project targeting the future establishment of an operational marine monitoring and forecasting system in the Mediterranean.

Ever since their conception in Japan some years back, foresight programmes have broken new ground given the new outlook, methodology and aptitude towards the present and future integration of new technologies with society's needs that they herald. Other countries were quickly allured by the success of the foresight approach and, in fact, EU candidate countries such as Estonia and Cyprus have applied the programme to couple together biotechnology and industry and also biotechnology and agriculture respectively.

Such programmes live up to their bidding as they focus mainly on a country's needs in the long-term rather than providing short-sighted solutions. In fact, the marine pilot project's mission statement entails the identification of Malta's needs in the marine sector till the year 2020 and how best to address them by harnessing available and also untapped solutions.

With a coastline of over 210 kilometres, with its territorial waters extending over an area 20 times its terrestrial precincts and with Malta being the fourth largest maritime flag in the world, the feeling that our country should seek to better tap its marine resources has been simmering for some time. In fact, although the marine sector generates about 6,000 direct jobs in our country, its contribution to the GDP is still a pittance - standing at just one per cent.

Malta's foresight forays have not stopped at the marine sector but also span the fields of information technology and biotechnology in two other separate eforesee programmes.

In order to achieve the ambitious goals enshrined in the marine pilot project, a forum of all possible stakeholders in this crunch sector for the Maltese economy was brought together. Exponents included within such a forum, hailing from such a polyvalent sector, included those involved in marine transportation (the Malta Maritime Authority), planning of land and sea resource use (the Malta Environment and Planning Authority), analysis of bathing water quality, environmental education, marine-based renewable energy sources and economics (all from the University of Malta), the leisure industry (the Malta Tourism Authority), marine legislation (the Institute of Maritime Law) and the marine-based food industry (the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries).

Such a holistic consultation is warranted by the multi-faceted nature of the marine sector itself. Two main points on which there was general consensus in the launching seminar were the fact that Malta is far from having reached its full potential in the marine sector and the fact that any future developments within such a sector must have the sustainability of our marine resources as their main cornerstone.

Degrading even further our marine resources will be tantamount to forfeiting the potential for future growth of the sector as a whole.

The coming months will be quite hectic ones for those harmonising the various emerging perspectives to turn them into one set of pragmatic and expert recommendations that will be submitted to the authorities for implementation.

More details on the project are obtainable at www.eforesee.info/malta/marine.shtml and by contacting the author at adrago@capemalta.net or the eforesee national coordinator at sdemarco@mcst.org.mt.

Mr Deidun is leader of the marine pilot project