Ann Smock

SMEA Professor Nives Dolsak along with a team of researchers from British, American and Australian institutions co-authored a paper titled “Engage key social concepts for sustainability” that was recently published in Science. The paper concludes that social science can contribute significantly to advancing and assessing conservation efforts. As stated in the UW Today article “the authors propose a set of social indicators that can be used to gauge how ecosystem management affects four essential factors in human lives: well-being, values, agency (the ability to act purposefully) and inequality. Considering such indicators, they note, serves not only to describe what exists but to define what is important in setting sustainability goals.” The Science article is the first of five peer-reviewed papers from the SWIMM group to be published. SWIMM-developed indicators of human well-being are already being used in integrated marine management, marine spatial planning and resilience assessments in the Pacific Northwest, thanks to an initiative by Washington Sea Grant and NOAA’s Integrated Ecosystem Assessment Program.