With the world facing a looming poly-crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and growing inequalities, there is an urgent need to enable societal transformation for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people. However, what this transformative change looks like and how to achieve it will manifest differently in diverse contexts and requires taking diverse people, their knowledge systems, different relationships with nature, and aspirations into account. SURPRISES will adopt a participatory futures approach to co-develop nature-positive visions under conditions of uncertainty, and to build multiple pathways and actions to achieve these in Africa’s ocean basins (we will undertake visioning workshops in the Western-Indian Ocean (WIO), the Benguela, Gulf of Guinea and adjacent islands).

These visions will then be used to scale to a pan-African Ocean vision built on bottom-up indicators and aspirations, with the support of the IUCN’s Great Blue Wall initiative. It emphasizes a transdisciplinary and inclusive approach to include the perspectives of diverse actors, especially those whose voices are marginalized in decision-making, and foregrounds their stories and narratives to engage with more powerful actors towards transformative change. In addition, this project aims to include the element of ‘surprise’ by engaging with the non-linear dynamics (feedback loops and tipping points) leading to irreversible changes in complex systems, to produce scenarios that are more robust in the face of uncertainties.

The overarching goal of the project is to understand what transformative change is needed to achieve sustainable and equitable coastal and marine futures that are resilient to surprises in African ocean basins. This entails identifying what visions and pathways of transformative change should be fostered with more equitable outcomes, understanding co-benefits and synergies across scales, and mismatch in aspirations, leading to potential downsides and trade-offs between local, regional and global visions and pathways.