This report presents the results from the project 'Future Fishermen'. The report addresses recruitment challenges in Danish fisheries with a particular focus on the Fisheries School's education. The purpose of the study was to provide a broader and more systematic knowledge base that the industry can use to address recruitment problems and challenges derived from them, e.g. generational change.
The report is based on a literature study and qualitative interviews with students at the Fisheries School (who are apprentices in relation to the internship) and other actors in the fisheries as the central empirical evidence. Along the way, we have sparred with representatives from the three fisheries organizations FSK‐PO, DFPO and DPPO, as well as employees at the Fisheries School. However, the conclusions are solely the authors' own.
The main purpose of the study was to understand young people's values and images of fisheries in order to increase recruitment to (and retention in) Danish fisheries and especially the Fisheries School. In this process, we have addressed 3 overall problem complexes that are important in terms of meeting the recruitment challenges in Danish fisheries: recruitment to the Fisheries School; recruitment to the entire fishing industry; and the Fisheries School's education.
Offshore energy hubs connect large amounts of offshore wind to a hub from where the generation can be transmitted to onshore, potentially linking to multiple surrounding countries. The benefits of such hubs, and the related meshed offshore grid to connect them, have been investigated in the North Sea. The system-wide impacts of offshore energy hubs in the Baltic Sea are less studied; however, the region is seeing increased interest in offshore wind development. This paper uses detailed offshore wind generation simulations and energy system optimisation to investigate the cost-effectiveness of offshore energy hubs in the Baltic Sea in different scenarios towards 2050. The results show that the largest deployment of offshore energy hubs occurs when the energy system is highly electrified. The strongest development of the offshore energy hubs occurs in the southern part of the Baltic Sea.
The cybersecurity landscape is evolving, driven by a reinforcing feedback loop of increasingly sophisticated attacks and defences. Threat actors, long benefitting from the asymmetrical “attacker’s advantage” of focused targeting, have now matured their organizational structures to facilitate tactical information sharing, technique specialization, the establishment of markets for buying and selling exploit and vulnerability information, and providing training on how to circumvent detection and defence systems.
Fishing is a human activity with various social and economic implications. In most countries, those implications are key factors to consider when deciding on specific management strategies. In this report, the fisheries management strategies implemented in the different European marine regions are reviewed, and relevant indicators, models and tools that can be used to predict the effectiveness of these strategies, from a social and economic point of view are identified. The objective was to identify the critical social and economic aspects of fisheries, relevant social and economic indicators, and regionally-relevant management measures to be considered in the evaluations of different management strategies later in the project.
The scoping consultations and systematic reviews identified a long list of potentially relevant key social and economic aspects and management measures. Among these, the most frequently mentioned items identified in scoping with stakeholders were windfarms, employment/jobs, MPAs, food supply, small-scale fisheries, local communities and pollution. The systematic review identified landings (volume or value), effort (days at sea), fuel costs, number of vessels, profit, aspects of costs, economic performance, sustainability-resilience, compliance and capacity as frequently occurring topics. The fisheries management policies most frequently mentioned were effort control, landing obligation, Individual Transferable Quota (ITQ), MPAs and TAC. Among the papers analyzed, more than 30%, concerned the Mediterranean region, followed by Western Waters, the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, indicating a higher contribution of Mediterranean studies to the conclusions.
Aspects identified frequently in both scoping and in systematic reviews included MPAs and small-scale fisheries, which were all identified in both methods as frequently occurring. However, there were also aspects which appeared to be represented differently in the evaluations (e.g. employment and local communities) indicating discrepancies between the available knowledge and that sought by the end users.
This paper analyses challenges and enablers for integrating a transboundary land-sea interaction (LSI) perspective into marine spatial planning (MSP) practice as experienced in the Baltic Sea Region. Collaborative research results from the Pan Baltic Scope project indicate that LSI remains an amorphous concept, particularly within a transboundary MSP context. Difficulty lies in bridging planning practices across land and sea and between varying uses, administrative settings and governance functions. Addressing LSI requires capacity, time, resources, awareness, reflection, and forums for collaborative learning across sectors and governance levels.
Knowledge of ecosystem services (ES) and the benefits provided by offshore marine areas, including the welfare impacts from the establishment of marine protected areas (MPAs) is still limited. In the present study we evaluated benefits from ES, citizens' willingness-to-pay for potential changes in the provision of ES, and welfare losses to citizens due to restrictions on economic activities from establishing new offshore MPAs in Latvian waters. The scenarios for the economic valuation were based on analyzing the supply of ES from the protected marine habitats, showing changes in the ES supply in policy relevant scenarios of the MPA size. Our study evaluates a wide array of ES delivered by offshore protected habitats and reveals that citizens' willingness-to-pay for preserving habitats and ES supply exceeds their welfare losses from restrictions in economic activities. Our approach supports the prioritization of habitat types according to their contribution to ES supply and benefits for citizens. The analysis can be complemented with spatial data regarding the distribution of habitats, providing an opportunity to identify areas with the highest ES benefits to support marine protection and spatial planning.
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Maritime spatial planning (MSP) needs tools to facilitate discussions and manage spatial data in collaborative workshops that involve actors with different types of backgrounds and expertise. Never the less, spatial tools in real-world MSP are only sparsely used. In the article it is argued that more knowledge about the use of GIS can support MSP is needed. It studies the use of GIS as a tool for collaborative MSP in five steps around development and testing of the prototype collaborative GIS, Baltic Explorer. The evaluation of the use found that the present functionalities of the system could support and facilitate the collaborative discussions in the MSP work. Still more research in the use of spatial data in the MSP process is needed.
With growing pressures on marine ecosystems and on marine space, an increasingly needed strategy to optimize the use of marine space is to co-locate synergic marine human uses in close spatial–temporal proximity while separating conflicting marine human uses. The ArcMap toolbox SEANERGY is a new, cross-sectoral spatial decision support tool (DST) that enables maritime spatial planners to consider synergies and conflicts between marine uses to support assessments of co-location options. Cross-sectoral approaches are important to reach more integrative maritime spatial planning (MSP) processes. As this article demonstrates through a Baltic Sea analysis, SEANERGY presents a crosssectoral use catalog for MSP through enabling the tool users to answer important specific questions to spatially and/or numerically weight potential synergies/conflicts between marine uses. The article discusses to what degree such a cross-sectoral perspective can support integrative MSP processes. While MSP integrative challenges still exist, SEANERGY enables MSP processes to move towards developing shared goals and initiate discussions built on best available knowledge regarding potential use-use synergies and use-use conflicts for whole sea basins at once.
With the blue economic sectors growing, marine macroalgae cultivation plays an important role in securing food and energy supplies, as well as better water quality in sustainable ways, whether alone or as part of a cluster solution to mitigate the effects of fish farming. While macroalgae cultivation exists in Europe, it is not that widely distributed yet; with increasing marine activities at sea, Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) needs to ensure social recognition as well as social and spatial representation for such a new marine activity. This comparative case study analysis of MSPs of three eastern Baltic Sea countries explores the levels of support for the development of macroalgae cultivation in MSP and the degree of co-location options for this new and increasingly important sector. It presents new analytical ways of incorporating co-location considerations into the concept of social sustainability. The results of this study support the harmonisation of views on co-location, propose ways of using space to benefit multiple users as well as marine ecosystems, and highlight some of the key social challenges and enablers for this sector.
This article contributes to the accelerating development of methods for sustainability assessment (SA) to support maritime spatial planning (MSP), by proposing an ecosystem services based framework for SA. MSP is generally seen as an important approach to promote a more sustainable use of sea space. However, so far all sustainability concerns are not equally well represented in planning practice; in particular, social sustainability aspects such as social justice and sociocultural values related to human-nature connectedness receive less attention. We first explored concepts and principles related to sustainability assessment and social sustainability in the scientific literature. Based on this, we analyzed how far the present approaches to assessments in Baltic Sea EU Member States have been extended from environmental concerns to towards broader sustainability concerns so far. Using current best practice in two pioneering countries (UK and Sweden), we illustrated how social sustainability principles could match with applied social impact criteria, and further, how such criteria can inform an ecosystem services-based impact assessment framework. Based on existing frameworks, including the DPSIR (driving forces, pressures, state, impact, response) environmental assessment framework and the ecosystem service cascade, we propose a sustainability impact assessment framework for MSP (MSP-SA) integrating across sustainability dimensions and including assessment of distributional aspects of marine ecosystem service benefits. Finally, we discuss the applicability and further development of the framework in relation to present day sustainability assessment practice in MSP.