OHI
British Columbia
How healthy are our coastal oceans?
Determining how healthy oceans are requires an approach that integrates social, economic, as well as environmental information. The Ocean Health Index does this by measuring the progress towards ten widely held goals that represent key benefits and services of healthy ecosystems. By analyzing these ten goals together we can get a comprehensive picture of the health of coastal systems. When these assessments are conducted on a local scale using the best available information, they can help inform policy and management practices to keep our oceans healthy.
Assessing ocean health in British Columbia
Working with local partners over the next two years, our team will adapt the Index to capture characteristics that make British Columbia’s coastal ecosystems unique. We will do this by incorporating locally meaningful information, priorities, and perspectives to characterize the ecosystems during each year over the last decade. With this we aim to track annual change in the health of BC’s ocean ecosystems and describe how management may have contributed to these patterns.
10 Ocean Health Index goals
Calculating the Ocean Health Index
Ocean Health Index scores are calculated for ten goals separately and then combined to get an overall score on a scale of 0-100. Goal scores are represented by the length of the petals in a flower plot, and the overall score is in the center.
This flower plot shows scores from the 2014 global assessment, where all of Canada’s oceans were assessed together. Incorporating local information, our work will evaluate ocean health at finer resolution, providing scores for several subprovincial regions in BC.
Development of the Ocean Health Index framework was published in the scientific journal Nature in 2012 (Halpern et al.). Since then, we have completed assessments for each coastal country and territory in the world each year. We have also conducted smaller-scale studies and are supporting independent assessments led by other groups.