News
Welcome to the 2nd edition of Blue Horizons!
As in the first issue of our joint newsletter, to bring you the latest updates of BLUE4ALL and MSP4BIO projects, as well as the latest news on Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP), and Ocean Conservation.
A highlight of this edition is a joint update on the recent workshop co-organized by BLUE4ALL and MSP4BIO at the 1st Mission Arena event in Gothenburg. Discover the insights gained and the outcomes of the workshop, including the much-anticipated ROADMAP 2030 - a comprehensive strategy addressing key goals for sustainable blue growth in the Baltic and North Seas.
Explore the progress of BLUE4ALL's Living Labs, including the co-creation of tailored tools for marine protection set to commence in 2024. Get a glimpse into MSP4BIO's interactions in Split and the Azores, showcasing the project's commitment to fostering maritime management stakeholders' engagement. Moreover, mark your calendars for upcoming events, such as the International Conference on Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning in Singapore and the Baltic Stakeholder Conference 2024.
In this issue, we also bring you external news, including the State of the Baltic Sea 2023 report, developments from the EU Blue Parks Community, and insights into the ICCAT Annual Meeting's decisions on sustainable fisheries. Don't miss announcements like the launch of the EU Blue Champions scheme and the call for abstracts for the 2024 EGU General Assembly.
The 2024 EGU General Assembly call for abstracts is open!
Aberdeen University, School of Geosciences is calling for Competition Funded PhD Project: Developing an Innovative System for Sustainable Resilience to Coastal Erosion: A Demonstration Project for Coastal Golf Courses!
Dr D Green, Prof J McKinley (Deadline for applications: Wednesday, January 17, 2024). Competition fully funded, 42-month PhD project is part of the QUADRAT Doctoral Training Partnership (Students Worldwide)
All coastlines are subject to dynamic change through wave and wind action resulting in significant loss or gain of land through erosion and/or accretion. Many areas around the World are increasingly being exposed to such threats resulting in partial or complete loss of assets in the most severe cases. In the future, climate change will likely accelerate the rate of coastline change with rising sea levels and more frequent and energetic storms. Widespread evidence of climate change impacts on coasts around the world, when coupled with increasing demands being placed on dwindling management budgets, and the need to protect valuable coastal assets suggests the need for new, more cost-effective, approaches to local coastal management problems.
A focus on developing new, low-cost, and environmentally sustainable solutions will be important. This research project will design, model, implement and test a novel coastal engineering solution for the protection of coastal assets at risk, specifically golf courses. A hybrid-protection solution using sustainable materials bound into a flexible and tethered structure, allowing wind- and water-borne material to penetrate, and be captured by the structure, will be developed, and tested. This will be a low-cost structure easily installed, maintained, and managed at the local community level.
EEA briefing: How climate change impacts marine life
This briefing summarises some of the ways in which climate change is impacting Europe’s marine ecosystems. It identifies how various ecosystem features are influenced by climate change and spotlights potential areas of concern. It also highlights areas where marine life may be more impacted by climate change compared with other areas. This work supports the recent integration of climate change as a key consideration in the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). It does this by presenting a spatial description of the vulnerabilities of marine areas to climate change.
Key messages
• Europe’s marine areas and marine life are unequally vulnerable to climate change. Recent research indicates that climate change may account for up to half of the combined impacts on marine ecosystems.
• Semi-enclosed seas (Baltic and Adriatic for example), and shallow coastal areas are more vulnerable to climate change compared to deeper, offshore areas.
• Most species are in a degraded state across Europe’s seas. Bony fish are potentially the only positive exception.
• Bottom-living communities and fish are more vulnerable than highly mobile mammals and birds, for example. This potentially impacts the whole marine food web and dependent fisheries.
• Globally, oceans are changing. Ocean warming (0.88°C higher in 2011-2020 compared to 1850-1900), oxygen loss (down 3-4% by 2100) and ocean acidification (decreased pH by 30% in 2023 compared to 1700) may be occurring at a speed that may be too fast for species to adapt to the changes.
Read the full briefing here!
New MSP research paper is now available online: Land-Sea-Interactions in MSP and ICZM: A regional perspective from the Mediterranean and the Black Sea
We are happy to promote our newly published joint research paper in Marine Policy Journal (Elsevier): Land-Sea-Interactions in MSP and ICZM: A regional perspective from the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, a collaboration of:
• t-ELIKA, Venice, Italy
• Priority Actions Programme/Regional Activity Centre (PAP/RAC), Split, Croatia
• Prostorsko načrtovanje, Ljubljana, Slovenia
• Center for Coastal and Marine Study (CCMS), Varna, Bulgaria
• Planning Authority, Malta
• IUAV University of Venice, Department of Architecture and Arts, Planning and Climate Change Lab, Venice, Italy
• Institute of Marine Science (ISMAR), National Research Council (CNR), Venice, Italy
Land-sea interactions are relevant for marine spatial planning. Natural processes at the land-sea interface shape the terrestrial and the marine environment, influencing coastal and maritime activities in the area. Coastal and sea uses also hold numerous land-sea interactions, calling for infrastructures and services both on the land and the sea side.
In this paper the Guidelines for LSI in MSP proposed by UNEP/MAP PAP/RAC to provide practical support to land-sea interaction analysis within MSP are applied in four case studies: Bulgaria, Italy, Malta and Montenegro, within formal and informal marine spatial planning processes. The Guidelines have proved to be flexible, scalable and suitable to tiered approaches. They were adapted to the specificities of different planning, geographic, governance contexts, responding to the state and the needs of MSP development in the different countries, including non-EU ones.