Ocean health plays an extraordinarily important role in the current climate crisis. The most prominent global policy tool to protect marine ecosystems are Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). While oceans play a crucial role in sustainability and resilience, and MPAs are the tool to preserve oceans, their efficiency is often questioned. This controversy has only increased as climate change adds additional, external stressors onto marine ecosystems. Contributing to a better understanding on the impacts of climate change to MPAs and current as well as potential governance responses, this project will focus on a comparison of MPAs in Indonesia and the Dutch Caribbean.

The Fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) invites Yvonne Kunz, together with Eric Mijts as a fellow from Aruba and Sonny Mumbunan as a fellow from Indonesia to work on their project ‘Climate change and the governance of tropical marine conservation’ for a period of 5 months in the academic year 2022/23. Yvonne, Eric and Sonny will become part of a carefully selected community of independent thinkers, in a collaborative environment where the space is created to ask new questions beyond disciplinary boundaries. NIAS Fellows are selected through a highly competitive external review process on the basis of the quality of the research proposal.

Read more about the research and fellowship.