Throughout history oceans have been of major concern to human civilization. They affect weather and climate, serve as routes of human dispersion, trade and transport, and provide important natural resources. A particularly important human-ocean interaction is the utilization of oceanic bio-resources for human nutrition, such as fish, seaweed and a range of others. Yet, the world fisheries are in a crisis due to overexploitation. There is urgent need to improve understanding of the processes at work, balancing risks and benefits, and provide policy-makers with sound scientific advice on how to ensure a sustainable availability of aquatic food for the future.
International marine research already exists at the European level. However, it is essentially organized along the classical scientific disciplines with little interdisciplinary interaction. To overcome this limitation a workshop titled “Sustainable Aquatic Food Supply - A EuropeanWorkshop Generating Interdisciplinary Research Projects” will be organized as a two-day meeting by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities on March 11th and 12th 2013 under the governance of a multi-disciplinary steering committee and Professor Klaus Lucas Vice President of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. It is financed by a Volkswagen Foundation grant. The central aim is the formulation of a pointedly interdisciplinary research program.