Ocean Best Practices: Advancing Interoperability and Equity for a Sustainable Ocean

Achieving the UN Ocean Decade's objectives necessitates coordinated, harmonized, and interoperable ocean observations and analyses across disciplines and scales. Central to this is adopting standardized methodologies—including guidelines, policies, protocols, and specifications—that underpin collaboration, data interoperability, and sustainable ocean management.

Best practices in ocean observing offer significant benefits; shared, well-documented methods support global and regional interoperability, capacity development and innovation across the ocean science value chain—from requirements setting, through observations and data management, to end-user applications and societal impacts.

The Ocean Best Practices System (OBPS) is a transformative initiative of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (UNESCO-IOC) facilitating the creation, archiving, discovery, and dissemination of methods, best practices, and standards. OBPS addresses the need for reliable, interoperable ocean data use, supporting a comprehensive global observing network from the deep ocean to the coast. It fosters knowledge transfer and capacity development, particularly for Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and Least Developed Countries (LDCs), addressing barriers to diversity and equity.

By focusing on methods standardization—a cornerstone of ocean activities—OBPS promotes inclusivity and collaboration across the ocean community. It interconnects all Ocean Decade Programmes , enabling the creation, sharing, and dissemination of accessible methodologies and best practices. This ensures greater participation of diverse stakeholders while supporting sustainable ocean management and innovation.

OBPS is carrying out different activities to fill existing gaps in creating, sharing, and interconnecting ocean observing knowledge and infrastructure globally:

• Training and Capacity Development among individuals and countries to develop and apply ocean best practices.
• Development of a Maturity Model for Practices [1] based on a five-level model differentiates between 'good' and 'best' practices, guiding practitioners toward continuous improvement.
• Establishing a Federated System for Methodology Sharing through distributed systems to allow organizations to maintain autonomy over assets, enhancing metadata sharing across repositories. This initiative enhances cross-indexing and discovery across repositories under the IOC OBPS and the Ocean Data and Information System (ODIS), in collaboration with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES).
• Linking Datasets and Methodologies for Traceability with the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet) that links datasets and methodologies in OBPS, aiming to expand to global repositories like the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS).
• Supporting the contributions of the OBPS OceanPractices Ocean Decade Programme to Ocean Decade vision and programmes 

OBPS plays a crucial role in enhancing the knowledge generation process and ensuring that best practices are widely accessible and adopted to ultimately support informed decision-making processes in ocean management. By linking maturity-assessed practices through a federated system of methodologies, OBPS fosters a cultural shift that places ocean knowledge ahead of policy.

[1] Mantovani C, et al (2024) An ocean practices maturity model: from good to best practices. Front. Mar. Sci. 11:1415374. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2024.1415374