Context: PHAROS follows the 3 Ocean Mission objectives:
1. (Mission Obj. 1); protecting and restoring marine ecosystems and biodiversity
2. (Mission Obj. 2); preventing and eliminating pollution of our ocean
3. (Mission Obj. 3): making the sustainable blue economy carbon-neutral and circular by 2030.
PHAROS Objective 1: Citizen and other stakeholder engagement and co-creation - For all objectives, citizen and other relevant stakeholder engagement will occur through local Living Labs from the start and throughout. This will ensure the specific Mission societal challenges are tackled with the project systemic solutions, leading to societal transformations and social impact. Linking and leveraging with RRING and GRRIP project and Communities.
Objective 2: Highly innovative Nature Based Solutions (NBS) for ecosystem and biodiversity restoration. PHAROS will demonstrate Integrated multitrophic and reef habitat restoration in 3 demo sites in the EU OM islands, and produce Replication plans for associated regions.
PHAROS Objective 3: A specific Arctic focus, recognising its growing and urgent importance due to its vulnerability to external stressors including global warming and pollution – extending the ECOTIP project relating to invasive species using eDNA monitoring, consisting of one demo and Replication plans.
PHAROS Objective 4: Marine Protected Areas (MPA) and Ecological corridors management – Cooperating with the BLUE4ALL project in extending the Blueprint platform and MPA network for MPA managers for successful co-management of MPA issues, including identification, categorisation, management, governance and corridor integration. The Living Labs established in the AA basin will validate the effective operation of the platform, network and corridors.
PHAROS Objective 5: Fishers and citizens as Guardians and Cleaners of the sea to address ocean pollution - Partnering with NETTAGPlus and others, PHAROS will transform the societal perspectives about the role of fishers by engaging, training and assisting them to become ocean guardians. The impact will be reducing the introduction of hazardous chemicals and microplastics originated from Abandoned, Lost, Discarded fishing gear (termed ALDFG); reducing ghost fishing, bycatch and entanglements of sensitive or endangered species on ALDFG; and improving mapping, tracking and recovery technologies to retrieve ALDFG. Further, citizens will be trained and supported to become litter entrepreneurs leveraging and extending the REMEDIES project.
PHAROS Objective 6: Education to ensure that the next generation continues the Mission – Partnering with project PROBLEU to expand and support the Network of European Blue Schools, attract a wide diversity of new members, improve ocean literacy across school communities.
PHAROS Objective 7: All PHAROS results and data will be interoperate with local Digital Twins of the Ocean, enabling data exploration, research, participation and citizen science. PHAROS will develop high sophisticate DTO for G2 demo sites and integrate in the Climarest and Blue4All platforms. Leveraging off OPUS project to implement best practice Open Science.
