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The Skimmer on Marine Ecosystems and Management

Serious games for coastal and marine conservation, management, and adaptation – Find a game for your work!

Historically, games were a means for young people to learn critical survival skills. In recent decades, however, games have come to be viewed as simply a source of entertainment. A recent movement – “serious gaming” – is now revitalizing the idea that games can do a lot more than just entertain. It is showing that they can be a powerful tool for teaching, engaging stakeholders, conducting research, and evaluating public policy. For instance, serious games can:

  • Help players better understand complex topics and the interests of a wide variety of groups, promoting thinking about systems as a whole
  • Let players experiment with and see the consequences of different choices over time, promoting longer-term thinking
  • Create a high level of engagement with the public, potentially at lower cost than other more traditional engagement activities
  • Help policymakers and researchers understand stakeholder decision making and the way stakeholders may respond to a variety of policy choices.

This month The Skimmer has compiled information about role-playing/simulation games designed to educate stakeholders, professionals, students, and the general public about aspects of coastal and marine conservation, management, and adaptation. These serious games allow players to experiment with coastal and marine conservation, management, and adaptation actions (or inaction) to help players, researchers, and policymakers better understand how coastal and marine ecosystems (including resource users and human communities) work. We also interview a range of game developers about their experiences using their games in the field.

Look through our new compilation for a serious game for your coastal and marine conservation, management, and adaptation work.

Read about how these games are being used to engage stakeholders, educate students and the general public, and conduct research.

The Skimmer on Marine Ecosystems and Management

Using serious games to increase understanding of marine ecosystem conservation and management: Practitioner experiences from around the world

The Skimmer interviewed three practitioners about their experiences developing and using serious games to educate stakeholders, professionals, students, and the general public about aspects of the conservation and management of coastal and marine ecosystems. Learn about:

One striking commonality of these stories is the ability of games to engage a wide variety of audiences – oftentimes even wider audiences than those for which they were developed – in discussion and learning about the conservation and management of marine ecosystems.

Search The Skimmer's compilation of serious games for coastal and marine conservation, management, and adaptation.

The Skimmer on Marine Ecosystems and Management

Latest News and Resources for Ocean Planners and Managers

The Skimmer on Marine Ecosystems and Management

Ocean solutions for climate change

It’s no secret that news about the ocean is pretty disheartening these days. So, as we get started with 2020, we here at The Skimmer want to highlight a new report that looks at ocean potential. The High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy recently released “The Ocean as a Solution for Climate Change: Five Opportunities for Action”, which quantifies contributions that ocean-based mitigation strategies can make in reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, while also delivering other ecosystem services. The report considers the potential contributions of:

  • Scaling up ocean-based renewable energy (e.g., wind, wave, and tidal power)
  • Reducing emissions from freight and passenger shipping
  • Increasing protection and restoration of coastal and marine ecosystems (particularly “blue carbon” habitats such as mangroves, tidal marshes, and seagrasses), which would provide carbon mitigation as well as other ecosystem service benefits
  • Shifting diets towards low-carbon sources of protein from the ocean
  • Storing carbon in the seabed.
The Skimmer on Marine Ecosystems and Management

Aquaculture and marine ecosystems: Friend or foe?

Aquaculture production is an increasingly important component of global seafood production. Seafood production from aquaculture has expanded nearly six-fold since 1990, while capture fisheries production has remained relatively stagnant. According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization’s most recent analysis of global fisheries and aquaculture, seafood production from aquaculture (excluding seaweeds) exceeded production from marine capture fisheries for the first time in 2016.[i]

Aquaculture’s reputation is mixed, however. It obviously has the potential to feed many people, but it has is associated with a number of observed and potential negative environmental impacts, including:

  • Altering and destroying habitat, such as mangrove forests, for aquaculture facilities
  • Escapes of farmed species into the wild, enabling species invasions and altering the genetics of wild populations
  • Spreading diseases and parasites to wild populations
  • Releasing fecal waste, uneaten food, and pesticides into the local environment, decreasing water quality
  • Contributing to the overfishing of wild fish populations because of the use of wild fish to feed farmed fish.

This negative view obscures the incredible diversity of aquaculture types and their diverse interactions with marine environments. Aquaculture enterprises vary in:

  • What species are cultivated (e.g., seaweeds, mollusks, crustaceans, finfish) and what they feed on (e.g., whether they are photosynthesizers, filter feeders, deposit feeders, herbivores, carnivores)
  • How intense production is (e.g., total biomass per cage, the degree to which fertilizer and supplementary feeds are used)
  • The type of environment production takes place in (e.g., freshwater streams or lakes, fully enclosed tanks, ponds, intertidal, sheltered bays, open ocean, sea pens, ponds, tanks).

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