Sierra Leone - State of the Marine Environment 2015

1. Identification of National Experts and Stakeholders: This step begins with the Identification and charting of the national and/or regional public and private bodies, agencies and organizations that, in addition to the one with the mandate of producing the report (“the reporting agency”), deal with the major aspects of marine and coastal environment research, monitoring, management and regulation (“the stakeholders”). In principle the steps following the stakeholder mapping should try to involve a representative fraction of the experts engaged by those bodies, agencies and organizations as this will improve the quality of the assessment and ensure the report holds a legitimate basis for decision-making. The reporting agency should announce the initiation of the report production process and invite the relevant stakeholders to participate in the process through the nomination of experts. The expert nomination should be confirmed by the reporting agency together with clarification on the mode and roles of involvement of the experts having due regard to time and budgetary constraints. An editorial board/committee for the report should be appointed by the reporting agency at this stage. This step is critical because if the experts invited are not representative of all aspects of the marine environment, or if they are skewed in number towards one particular discipline (eg. biology), then the assessment will be biased. In most cases a minimum representation of each of the key discipline areas (eg. ecology, biology, fisheries, physical sciences and socioeconomics) will be needed. Experts representing the full range of marine sectors are needed to produce a rigorous assessment. Upon acceptance, each participant should be provided with detailed background information on the assessment process. 2. Relevant information identification and compilation: The reporting agency, with the support of the experts nominated, should initiate the identification and collation of relevant information (publications, scientific papers, databases and data sets) and make it electronically available to all experts involved. 3. Expert review of the assessment themes and parameters: A suggested structure for the assessment built around a set of themes and parameters is included below. Of course not all may apply directly to a particular region, but they provide a guide for the design of the assessment to be carried out. Experts will be requested to review and make suggestions on the parameters for condition, threats and risk, and the elicitation procedures. They will also review the collated relevant information and suggest additions. 4. Expert Elicitation assessment: The EE assessment is carried out during a workshop or series of workshops, attended by the appointed experts. The scores assigned to the parameters (as described below) are recorded during the workshop. Notes are taken by a rapporteur on the discussion and the details of relevant reports, papers or other documents are recorded. The interaction and discussions during the workshop/s should allow the editorial board to identify potential authors to participate in the subsequent report-writing phase of the process. 5. Report drafting: The scores of the assessment parameters and any details are compiled, analyzed by the reporting agency and provided in a concise and organized way to the editorial committee. These are distributed to the different author/s appointed for the different themes/chapters who are tasked with producing draft chapters based on the outcomes of the EE assessment and any generic introductory insight they may want to bring in. The editorial committee should also produce text for any introductory chapters describing the scope, approach, process and methodology used to produce the report. The editorial committee should then compile and edit a first draft with focus on completeness and evenness of the different sections of the report.

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