Professor Azwinndini Muronga
Prof Muronga was speaking at the recent opening of the CMR’s three-day Annual Research Symposium 2025, held on the Ocean Sciences Campus.
He said the symposium’s theme, “Science to impact” resonated with a strategic focus of Mandela University’s Vision 2030 – to pursue impactful research “to address grand societal challenges and promote sustainable futures”.
The symposium’s opening address was also an opportunity to bid farewell to Professor Mandy Lombard for her role as the holder of a South African Research Chairs Initiative ( SARChI) Chair in Marine Spatial Planning.
One of five SARChI chairs at CMR, Prof Lombard held the position for 10 years. She will continue to work with the CMR but if the NRF renews the Chair in 2026, a new incumbent will hopefully take over to continue the work under a slightly modified name: the SARChI Chair of Oceans Ecology and Sustainability.
CMR director, Dr Denise Schael, spoke of Prof Lombard’s “lasting legacy not only within CMR, but across the broader field of ocean sciences”.
Professor Mandy Lombard
Prof Lombard said she was so happy to see familiar names at the symposium, both among those attending in person and online, because so many of her protégés are dispersed around the world.
“I run an export business,” she said. “I train scientists, export them, and then they go and do great things”.
She said when she first got the email asking her if she wanted to be the SARChI chair, she had had to Google “marine spatial planning” before realising she was already doing that, just not under that name. “So that’s how it started,” she said. Faced with money for research, “I immediately emailed all my friends, many of you in the room, saying, ‘What should I do?’”
This exploration led to the Chair’s research objectives:
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understanding the spatial and seasonal distributions of marine biodiversity and habitats
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evaluating of marine ecosystem services
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improving datasets and tools to support the management of marine resources
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predictive modelling of the outcomes of environmental drivers of change; and
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using these outputs in a marine spatial framework to guide policy and management.
Citing the ancient Sufi parable of what a blind person would see if confronting only part of an elephant, Prof Lombard said two people had taught her the need to see the whole picture.
They were Bernadette (Berny) Snow, CMR adjunct professor and Senior Lecturer in Marine Social Science at the Scottish Association for Marine Sciences, who had insisted on the need to bring in social scientists and social-ecological systems, and Dr Jai Kumar Clifford-Holmes, CMR research associate and Executive Director of the Association for Water and Rural Development, who had provided systems dynamic modelling tools.
She said her own comfort zone is ecosystem integrity. Yet she soon realised the value of venturing into the unfamiliar with others who knew what they were doing. “You bring them in, and then it starts to come together,” Prof Lombard said.
“We even wrote a paper of principles for transformative ocean governance. I have absolutely no idea what that paper was about 10 years down the line, but at the time, it was fantastic, and it made so much sense. People loved it. And that was really, for me, a transition context”.
She spoke of the importance of the “interdisciplinary dance”, of working with economists, legal people. social scientists, biophysical scientists, and modellers.
The Chair’s research funding during her tenure totalled R615m. It included R47m from the South African government, R5m from the German government, and R383m from the UK government.
Prof Lombard used a pie chart to illustrate how she had spent a large proportion of her time on administration, such as dealing with emails and writing reports. This was despite the contractual stipulation that SARChI chairs not spend more than 5% of their time on such activities, and her own efficient tendency of using spreadsheets “for everything”, she said.
“The song I sing to future such Chairs and to the National Research Foundation is: you don't fund the Chair, you fund the Chair and a person that does all this other stuff,” she said. Surprisingly, some projects had taken less time than expected, because of the excellence of the teams working on them.
Writing outputs included 57 papers and two book chapters. And they had presented at 84 national conferences and 66 international ones.
Lowlights included the government passing the Marine Spatial Planning Act in April 2018, and Prof Lombard and her team thinking they would position all their work into supporting it. “It didn’t work. It wasn’t our fault. Government wasn’t ready for us,” she said.
Highlights included the Ocean Stewards programme run by WILDOCEANS, “which provided an opportunity for young people who had never been to sea”. Another was the team’s systems thinking and scenario planning, which they had “started to get that right, and that's why this journey is incomplete,” she said.
The biggest accolade for Prof Lombard was when speaker after speaker on day one of the symposium thanked her for her input.
She concluded by saying that without the CMR supporting her transdisciplinary research, the Chair’s novel work would not have been possible.