Developing FRDC’s 2020-2025 RD&E Plan
Industry capability and mapping report and workshop
Travel bursary: Symposium on Responsible Fishing Technology for Healthy Ecosystems and Clean Environment
Building a data-driven jurisdictional stock status reporting platform
Currently reporting processes are highly manual with exchange of documents between authors and reviewers as well as copy-editing/formatting administered by the FRDC. Automation of reports would remove these manual inefficiencies freeing up the time of FRDC, authors and reviewers alike, enabling them to focus more on the research and less on the reporting commitments of SAFS. Automation of reporting could also disrupt the current biannual timeline currently applied to SAFS. With automated reporting, jurisdictions do not require FRDC administration of the authoring process and would be able to update reports on timelines that align with other jurisdictional commitments (i.e. the production of their own status reports) - this will also enable a more timely update should stock status change. More so, jurisdictions currently undertake SAFS reporting in addition to their own jurisdictional reporting, as they are often required to report on broader issues that are consider too 'bespoke' to be considered in a national report. Automation of reports, enables jurisdictions to produce reports that align with SAFS as well as their own jurisdictional requirements in one system, streamlining the concurrent reporting processes into one reporting process. This works by ensuring that a the system is built to support reporting of fields critical for SAFS as well as fields necessary for the relevant jurisdictional reporting (FRDC then generate the SAFS reports pulling fields only relevant to SAFS whilst the jurisdictions can report more broadly by publishing the fields they require - acknowledging that bespoke jurisdictional reports would still be subject to the same rigorous peer review process of the SAFS report to ensure integrity of the reports)
Travel bursary: Sustainable Ocean Summit 2017, Canada
Australia possesses significant coastal and near coastal oil and gas reserves within its continental shelf. It follows that oil and gas exploration (especially seismic) is also significant; especially in the the Bass Strait, Great Australian Bight and North-Western 'Kimberley' areas of Australia. Up until recently, the offshore regulatory framework which includes assessment of effects on the aquatic environment and engagement with other users has been somewhat nebulous and Offshore Industry driven, with the development of aquatic environmental benchmarks being based on the same process as offshore OH&S and butressed by disputed sometimes irrelevant science.
Seismic expoloration in recent years has seen increased interaction between different aquatic ecosystems and marine users, resulting in a "contact" situation that was initially calamitous; but which has resulted in significant investment in Marine biological R&D, an increase in the deployment of the precautionary principle and marine environmental policy innovation.
Johnathon Davey (SIV) and Aaron Irving (NAC) will deliver a presentation that will draw on a number of aquatic environmental effects research project where Australia's fishing sectors were or are driving, policy innovations that we assisted in driving or supporting and case studies including the pearling Industry story, to provide a snapshot of the exciting work being undertaken in Australia currently in the marine environmental space with regard to the effects of seismic surveying and the ability for different users to play together successfully.