Project description
Transition pathways to sustainable ocean resource management
Oceans play a crucial role in supporting life on Earth. In addition to producing oxygen, regulating the climate and providing a habitat for diverse marine species, oceans are a significant source of food, energy and raw materials. In this context, the EU-funded Blue Paths project will contribute to addressing the sustainability challenges that stem from unclear interpretations, human pressures and lack of integrated methodologies in marine socio-ecological system analysis. Specifically, it will develop an integrated framework linking human-environment interactions to blue growth sectors and pervasive ocean technologies, identify sustainable pathways for ocean resource use, and deliver new knowledge for ocean resource management and planning. This will be achieved by providing innovative tools for decision making and adaptive management of marine resources.
Objective
"Oceans are a life-support system for human societies. They supply fundamental goods such as fish food, materials, energy and provide benefits associated with our well-being, they form cultural values and contribute to jobs creation and trade. The development of national ocean development plans combined with Blue Growth (BG) strategies are turning the ocean into a new frontier of industrial development. In fact, the EU's Blue Economy produces a turnover of 750 billion euro/year. However, the actual sustainability of this Blue Acceleration process remain to a large extent uncertain, due to 1) an unclear interpretation of the concept of ""Blue Growth"" across different policies, the 2) multiple human pressures across scales and marine regions cause ecological degradation with high social costs and 3) the lack of integrated methodologies that can capture the effects of the BG trends on oceans health and human well-being over spatio-temporal scales. There is an urgent need for interdisciplinary approaches that can address the pathways of sustainable transitions in marine realms and the deriving benefits and costs to society and the environment. Blue-Paths aims to 1) develop an integrated human-ocean framework for BG; 2) identify environmental and socio-economic effects of pathways of sustainable transitions on the use of ocean?s ecosystem goods and services and 3) deliver new knowledge on the management and planning of ocean resource. To do so, Blue-Paths will couple a marine socio-ecological system (SES) framework with an Ensemble Machine Learning (ML) technique to simulate the spatio-temporal environmental and socio-economic effects on the marine SES induced by pervasive ocean technologies. This is of high practical value, as it will be tested on the 2050 ecological transition plan of Spain. Blue-Paths framework combined with ML techniques will provide innovative tools to monitor the sustainable use of the ocean space and foster adaptive management of marine resources."
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
17004 Girona
Spain