Marine and coastal ecosystems, essential for human life and society, are threatened by multiple interacting pressures from human activities as well as climate change. The resulting habitat degradation and biodiversity loss can alter ecosystem functions and compromise ocean health and the capacity to provide vital ecosystem goods and services. Despite some success stories, European policies for marine conservation fall short of being effective. Efforts to halt the loss of marine biodiversity are hampered by numerous factors such as: a) the lack of systematic procedures for the selection of conservation areas often leads to non-strategic marine spatial planning (MSP) that does not acknowledge the effects of climate change and ecosystem connectivity, b) incomplete knowledge of the scale and impact of pressures and threats from human activities precludes the restoration of past damage and reduction of future impacts to the marine environment, and c) limited participation of the public in the decision-making process compromises the implementation and effectiveness of conservation actions and efforts.
BioProtect has been designed to address these factors, to provide solutions to the challenge of marine biodiversity loss, to reach the targets of the EU 2030 Biodiversity Strategy, EU Arctic policy and EU Green deal and it will focus on the use of area-based management approaches as solutions to identify which areas to protect and understand what outcomes (environmental, biological, socio-economical) arise from such protection.
This will be its core, with innovation coming from new tools and novel combinations of existing tools, methods and data at multiple spatial scales, from ocean basins to the local coastal community, emphasising strong involvement of stakeholders and the public.
The overall objective of BioProtect is to co-develop and demonstrate transferable ecosystem-based solutions to accelerate the effective protection and restoration of biodiversity in marine and coastal ecosystems.
BioProtect will develop and promote the use of an area-based management decision support framework to support ecosystem-based MSP and reduce multiple interacting pressures from human activities in European seas.
The BioProtect area-based management decision support system (ABM -DSF) includes:
• Recommendations for good governance and management.
• Procedures and technologies to activate and engage citizens and stakeholders in co-design and decision-making.
• Strategies to map, monitor and forecast changes in marine biodiversity.
• Process to identify risks and adaptive measures to reduce pressures from human activities on marine biodiversity.
• Decision support tool (DST) for ecosystem-based conservation and restoration planning.
• Impact assessment workflows to understand the ecological and socio-economic consequences of management options.
• Capacity building to facilitate the use of the framework.
