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Brief
The global community recognizes Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the de facto standard for measuring sustainable practices across sectors. The SDGs with the 17 defined areas, more or less cover the entire gamut of interconnected dimensions. There are parameters that measure the qualitative and quantitative compliance to the SDGs and thus need to be analysed in a comprehensive scale. These measurements will require a Modelling & Simulation (M&S) construct first to generate a precise assessment along with field experimental validation mechanism to build confidence on the prediction tools.
The freshwater systems play a critical role in the entire ecosystem management and the growing population is putting massive stress on these systems. The so called development aspiration in the absence of a matured governance mechanism, is becoming a major sustainability concern. The regulatory structure is not able to keep pace with the development projects and the lack of a comprehensive appreciation of the ground realities and limited environmental impact assessment mechanism is a major cause of concern. The socio-political, socio-economic and socio-cultural factors will have a deep impact in our management of the freshwater systems. The riverine communities have developed significant understanding of their traditional practise and the corresponding ecosystem impact over generations. However the rapid scaling up required to keep pace the ongoing mega-initiatives is making it difficult to incorporate their traditional knowledge in ensuring sustainable development.
The tropical waters present very unique characteristics and merit customized efforts to manage the challenges and opportunities. The sediment transport, bio-diversity, rainfall pattern, climate cycles and more are extremely unique and have profound impact on the freshwater management process. The SDGs address the overall sustainability concerns, however a detailed customization for the tropical waters will be in order to manage these aspects comprehensively. The policy & technology interventions along with the acoustic capacity and capability building will be the key. The tropical waters also face severe sub-optimal performance of the sonars deployed for any acoustic survey underwater. Thus, the way ahead must factor such limitations at the design stage.
This, project looks at the SDGs for the freshwater systems in the tropical waters. The specific aspects will include, SDGs and the Global Order, Freshwater Eco-systems and varied Challenges and Opportunities, Parameters to evaluate the SDGs across the freshwater eco-systems, Socio-political, socio-economic & socio-cultural dimension in the tropical waters of the Indo-Pacific region.
The UDA framework can address all the four aspects in a comprehensive manner with M&S and field experimental validation. Digital tools like the Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) will be deployed to provide and real-time ground appreciation and data driven regulatory structure. The overall policy & technology interventions along with the acoustic capacity & capability building will be formalized.