Global Goals Week – Goal 14 (Life Below Water)

The Sustainable Development Goals are a collection of 17 interlinked global goals designed to be a “blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all”. The SDGs were set up in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly and are intended to be achieved by the year 2030.

Goal 14 – Life Below Water

AIM: Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development

JONAS is an INTERREG Atlantic Area-funded project that brings together partners from Ireland, the UK, France, Portugal, and Spain to address the transboundary issue of underwater noise. JONAS will bring better monitoring and risk management to the Northeast Atlantic region, supporting European nations in meeting MSFD requirements.

JONAS aims to address the risks of acoustic pressures on biodiversity, focusing on sensitive receptor species in the North Atlantic, by streamlining ocean noise monitoring and risk prediction.

The Navigate project is a 4-year project to enhance capacity and provide policy analysis funded by Ireland’s Marine Institute. Based at UCC, Environmental Research Institute’s MaREI Centre the project brings together marine policy and law experts from MaREI and the School of Law (UCC) with the aim of integrating Ireland’s marine policies to help deliver on our national strategy for the marine, “Harnessing our Ocean Wealth”.

With a multitude of marine sectoral activities and a complex planning and management system, it is essential that there is coherency between national marine/maritime policies and planning mechanisms across various scales of implementation including national, sub-national, local, cross-border (with Northern Ireland), and transboundary (with Britain and wider Atlantic region). Work conducted in the Navigate project seeks to better deliver coherency including across land-sea interactions.