Elsevier

Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science

Volume 201, 5 February 2018, Pages 164-171
Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science

Defining scenarios of future vectors of change in marine life and associated economic sectors

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecss.2015.10.020Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The complex nature of marine policy requires interdisciplinary scenarios.

  • We present a set of scenarios to facilitate analysis of marine policy.

  • Dual role of policy decisions complicates developing scenarios.

  • Societal and physical drivers differ substantially in time scale.

Abstract

Addressing the multitude of challenges in marine policy requires an integrated approach that considers the multitude of drivers, pressures, and interests, from several disciplinary angles. Scenarios are needed to harmonise the analyses of different components of the marine system, and to deal with the uncertainty and complexity of the societal and biogeophysical dynamics in the system. This study considers a set of socio-economic scenarios to (1) explore possible futures in relation to marine invasive species, outbreak forming species, and gradual changes in species distribution and productivity; and (2) harmonise the projection modelling performed within associated studies. The exercise demonstrates that developing interdisciplinary scenarios as developed in this study is particularly complicated due to (1) the wide variety in endogeneity or exogeneity of variables in the different analyses involved; (2) the dual role of policy decisions as variables in a scenario or decisions to be evaluated and compared to other decisions; and (3) the substantial difference in time scale between societal and physical drivers.

Introduction

Marine ecosystems are affected by a host of anthropogenic pressures, including climate change, ocean acidification, nutrient discharges, intensive fishing pressure and introduction of invasive alien species (Halpern et al., 2008). Each of these poses risks and hazards to the marine environment, its users and society at large (Elliott et al., 2014). Addressing these challenges simultaneously requires an integrated approach that considers the multitude of drivers, pressures, and interests from several disciplinary angles (Pikitch et al., 2004, Schindler and Hilborn, 2015). Likewise, ex-ante policy evaluations, considering a wide variety of possible futures, require the development of integrated multidisciplinary scenarios. Integrated marine management then requires that stakeholder views and conflict resolution, governance mechanisms, risk analysis and risk management and measures to fulfil the Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management (Pikitch et al., 2004) are all combined (Elliott, 2014).

The EU VECTORS project was part of the ‘Oceans of Tomorrow’ initiative and was designed to analyse the ecological, environmental and societal consequences of introduction of marine invasive species, outbreak forming species, and gradual changes in species distribution and productivity. The accompanying research focussed on possible trends in major global drivers such as climate change, economic development, and human population growth, and how these interact with a host of regional anthropogenic pressures in the marine environment. In this context, pressures are regarded as the mechanisms emanating from human activities such that, unless mitigation measures are implemented, those activities will lead to state changes and impacts on society. In EU waters, those pressures include, for example, changes in the magnitude of maritime shipping, the extent of areas designated for offshore wind farms or marine protected areas, the release of land-based pollutants, and amount of income generated from tourism to coastal and marine areas. Hence the management of these pressures requires an integration of both natural (ecology, biogeochemistry, oceanography) and social (economics, governance, policy) sciences (Elliott, 2013).

The multifaceted nature of the relationship between human society and European marine environments and ecosystems has necessitated the adoption of many interlinked pieces of legislation and administrative mechanisms (Boyes and Elliott, 2014). In turn, these are being combined into the EU Integrated Maritime Policy. The revised Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) (EU, 2013), a pillar of this strategy, aims to ensure that fishing practices are environmentally, economically and socially sustainable, and that they provide a sufficient source of healthy food for citizens throughout Europe in the long term. The environmental pillar of the Integrated Maritime Policy is the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) (EU, 2008), which aims to more effectively protect the marine environment, and to implement an ‘ecosystem approach’ to the management of all human activities in the sea with the goal to enable the sustainable use of living marine resources and to ensure the marine environment is safeguarded for future use (Borja et al., 2013). Most recently, the EU Maritime Spatial Planning Directive aims to ensure that marine developments can be planned and managed but within a sustainable marine management system (EC, 2014).

The marine system will change not only due to anthropogenic pressures operating within an area, but also due to the prevailing socio-geopolitical environment and also external factors such as climate change. Hence the challenge in management is to incorporate these interacting factors and scenarios. Harmonising the different analyses and future projections for different components of the marine system necessitates a degree of agreement on how aspects of socio-economic as well as biogeochemical and ecological components of regional seas will change in the future. This study considers a set of socio-economic scenarios to (1) explore possible futures in relation to marine invasive species, outbreak forming species, and gradual changes in species distribution and productivity, and (2) harmonise the projection modelling performed within associated studies (Groeneveld et al., 2015, Kay and Butenschön, 2015, Stolte et al., 2015).

Examples of policy domains where scenarios are typically applied include: climate policy (Nakićenović, 2000, Nakićenović et al., 2000, Moss et al., 2010); landscape planning (Brand et al., 2013, Hirschi et al., 2013); but also marine policy (Haward et al., 2013, van Hoof et al., 2014). Börjeson et al. (2006) provides a valuable typology of scenarios by distinguishing among predictive, explorative, and normative scenarios. Predictive scenarios aim to provide the most likely outcome of an uncertain process, whether or not conditional on a policy. Hence, they are most suitable for tactical decisions that deal with the foreseeable future. Explorative scenarios are designed to examine the range of possible outcomes of an uncertain future. Unlike predictive scenarios, which focus on the most likely outcome, explorative scenarios deal with the range of possible outcomes. To paraphrase Börjeson et al. (2006), predictive scenarios are directed at the question “what will happen?”, whereas explorative scenarios are directed at the question “what can happen?” Lastly, normative scenarios focus on how a pre-specified target can be reached.

The current assessment is carried out against a background of highly complex issues, involving many stakeholders and activities, and the need to approach these issues from a trans-disciplinary perspective. This complexity renders the common approaches to uncertainty analysis inadequate: there are simply too many variables involved, and too many interlinkages between them, for a Worst-Case Analysis or a Monte-Carlo Analysis. Moreover, the approach suggested here aims to facilitate strategic rather than tactical policy decisions, dealing with a time horizon over which many developments are highly uncertain. Therefore, in Börjeson et al.'s (2006) typology, the scenarios developed and discussed here are explorative scenarios, dealing with a set of alternative possible futures.

This article presents the scenarios developed within the VECTORS programme, and considers the way in which they were derived and the issues that had to be overcome to specify them. The article is organised as follows. The following section explains the general approach in the development of the scenarios. Section 3 presents the quantified developments in key variables as assumed in the scenarios. Section 4 concludes with the main observations and lessons learnt from the process of scenario development.

Section snippets

Developing scenarios for the marine environment

The wealth of experience suggests that there is no single, strategically best way to work with scenarios (Pinnegar et al., 2006). However, well-designed explorative scenarios do seem to share some common features including: (1) scenarios are best created through a collaborative process that takes into account the necessary expertise across disciplines; (2) the time horizon is sufficiently distant that the future situation is uncertain; (3) the scenarios are credible in the sense that those

Conclusions and lessons learnt

Marine ecosystems are characterised by a highly complex web of actors, interests, and processes, and information important for creating future scenarios stems a wide variety of scientific disciplines and experts. As shown here, this complexity can only be addressed by involving economists, ecologists, policy scientists, as well as user groups and/or industries. The development of future scenarios in a similar manner as the SRES scenarios (Nakićenović et al., 2000) facilitated the coordination

Acknowledgements

The research leading to this publication has received funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) within the Ocean of Tomorrow call under Grant Agreement No. 266445 for the project Vectors of Change in Oceans and Seas Marine Life, Impact on Economic Sectors (VECTORS).

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