Knowledge

This report discusses the concept of governance, how to understand 'effective' governance, and a research plan for further studies of the effectiveness of and potential for improving governance at the regional and sub-regional level in the SEAwise regions (Baltic Sea, North Sea, Western Waters, and the Mediterranean Sea). The theoretical insights from the first two main parts inform and are merged into the research plan, forming the last part of the report. The work is based on the recognition that fisheries management in Europe is still struggling to deliver on its objectives relating to ecology, economy, and social considerations although improvements have been made over the last decades. On top of this, marine biodiversity and ecosystem integrity can be identified as pressing challenges, while climate change presents renewed uncertainties and risks.

Improved governance, appropriately designed for Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management (EBFM), is key to improving the system performance towards the societal objectives. Lack of appropriate measures towards cooperation between the EU, national, and regional levels has led to uncoordinated decision-making processes and prevented coherent management through the implementation and adoption of EU legislation, leading to lower than desired performance both of fisheries and environmental policies. Referring specifically to the involvement of stakeholders, the European Commission stresses the importance of transparency, cooperation, outreach, information, and inclusiveness in developing and implementing measures to ensure that all stakeholders, not least fishermen, have a say in the management process, and that their needs and concerns are considered (European Commission, 2023a). Improvement of what can broadly be defined as 'governance' is, thus, among the pathways that the European Commission has identified for improvements in the area.

The following report presents the results of the experimental testing of the Exowave wave energy converter (WEC) performed in September 2023 at the Ocean and Coastal Engineering Laboratory at Aalborg University, Denmark. The model tests are performed based on the current design of the WEC35 Exowave floater as part of the project 250 MW bølgekraft I den danske Nordsø før 2030 – fase 1 supported by the Danish Energy Agency under the Energy Technology Development and Demonstration Program (EUDP) contract number 64022-1062.

The concept of 'seal-fishery conflict' is used when referring to the complex contradictions stemming from seals' impacts on fishing livelihoods, a pertinent social struggle between stakeholder groups of the Baltic Sea. Tensions are most remarkable between coastal fisheries and seal conservationists. As existing knowledge has been scattered and the conflict has become increasingly problematic, the RESOCO project compiled Nordic knowledge and best practices and built an interdisciplinary synthesis to set the stage for alternative solutions on how to effectively reconcile the seal-fishery conflict in the Baltic Sea. The report takes a pragmatic stand by turning the attention to approaches and instruments that have been suggested to be helpful or that have the potential to help mitigate the conflict. The report synthesizes knowledge and presents existing gaps and needs of further research.

In a new book, senior researcher Jessica Larsen analyses how relevant anti-piracy legislation was enforced when international ship contributions and regional coastal states cooperated on anti-piracy off the coast of Somalia in 2008-2016.

The book is a socio-legal study based on both clause analyses and ethnographic fieldwork. The book takes the reader on board a warship patrolling the Indian Ocean and into the courtrooms of the island nation of Seychelles, which conducted 17 piracy cases. Through interviews and observations, the book uncovers how anti-piracy legislation works in practice. Existing studies have primarily examined existing law. This book goes out into the field to also uncover applied law.

The analysis shows examples of ambiguity about which legal sources should be applied at sea. It identifies practices in court that show cases of impunity and questions legal certainty. The implications of this should be considered as counter-piracy off Somalia has been used as a model for counter-piracy elsewhere, such as in the Gulf of Guinea.

The implementation of unmanned vessels will evidently come with its own legal challenges. One of the most crucial of these is the identification of the role and status of the shore-based controller (SBC) for the purposes of determining liability. Different liability regimes apply different legal principles in this regard. This article will explore these issues from the perspective of English law and Scandinavian law.

This work presents a comparative study of two signal processing methods for the estimation of the roll natural frequency towards the real-time transverse stability monitoring of fishing vessels. The first method is based on sequential application of the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT); the second method combines the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) and the Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT). The performance of the two methods is analysed using roll motion data of a stern trawler. Simulated time series from a one degree-of-freedom nonlinear model, and experimental time series obtained from towing tank tests are utilized for the evaluation. In both cases, beam waves are considered but, while irregular waves are adopted in the simulated data, the towing tank tests are made in regular waves. Based on the available data the performance of both estimation methods is comparable, but the EMD-HHT method turns out slightly better than the sequential FFT. Finally, the use of a statistical change detector, together with the EMD-HHT methodology, is proposed as a possible approach for the practical implementation of an onboard stability monitoring system.

This PhD thesis examines the role of market-based measures (MBMs) in incentivizing international shipping greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions to leverage the decarbonization efforts of the International Maritime Organization (IMO). The research motivation sprang from the Initial IMO Strategy, which, among other climate ambitions, envisages at least a 50% curb of GHG emissions until 2050 vis-a-vis 2008 levels. The regulatory framework involves several candidate measures, including MBMs, i.e., environmental policies like carbon taxes and emissions trading systems (ETS) that enforce the "polluter-pays" principle, and thus provide fiscal incentives to stakeholders to eliminate their carbon footprint.

The assessment of MBMs as means of decarbonizing shipping is based on three main pillars: their economic efficiency, their environmental effectiveness, and their climate policy design. Compliance with carbon pricing regimes can entail the adoption of both operational measures, such as speed reduction, route reconfiguration, or voyage optimization techniques, and technological measures like the uptake of zero-carbon technologies and alternative marine fuels. Due to this wide range of conformity practices, this thesis assesses several short- and long-term responses to MBMs in order to encapsulate their cost effectiveness in relation to their carbon abatement potential.

From a climate policy design perspective, the two most prominent types of MBMs are the carbon taxes, a fixed-price approach that provides carbon price certainty, and the ETSs, a fixedquantity system that secures that GHG emissions levels are met. At first, the study evaluates the prospects of a carbon levy to achieve GHG emissions reductions by analyzing the macroeconomic effects of freight rates and fuel prices in inducing slow steaming as an operational response to the MBM. The results show that market conditions influence the overall effectiveness of a tax and that the attained reductions, although significant, are insufficient to reach the 50% decarbonization targets. Moreover, considering the imminent inclusion of the maritime sector into the EU ETS, the thesis examines the scenario of liner shipping operators opting for route reconfigurations as an operational response to a regional ETS. The outputs reveal that replacing EU ports with nearby non-EU competitor ports becomes cost-effective for minimal EU carbon prices. The action would result in carbon leakage, EU ETS evasion, loss of EU ETS revenue, and penalization of the EU ports.

To the extent that MBMs induce technological changes, this thesis evaluates the level of carbon pricing needed to close the price gap between alternative and conventional marine fuels. The analysis considers the capital and operational costs for implementing and utilizing alternative marine fuels onboard and develops their marginal abatement cost curves (MACCs) to evaluate their cost-competitiveness and carbon abatement spectrum. The analysis indicates that to reach full maritime decarbonization, fuels such as green liquid hydrogen and their supporting technology, as of today’s cost estimations, would require a carbon price of up to 700 USD/MT CO2e to become cost-competitive.

The thesis concludes that accounting for a well-to-wake scope of emissions will create the right
incentives for developing sustainable alternative marine fuel production pathways to facilitate
shipping’s future energy demand. Revenues from MBMs will be substantial and can accelerate
R&D, scale-up the availability of alternative fuels, subsidize "fist-movers" and green ships and
reverse possible detrimental effects of carbon pricing to developing countries such as the Least
Developed Countries (LDCs) and the Small Island Developing States (SIDS).

The energy system needs a range of forecast types for its operation in addition to the narrow wind power forecast that has been the focus of considerable recent attention. Therefore, the group behind the former IEA Wind Task 36 Forecasting for Wind Energy has initiated a new IEA Wind Task with a much broader perspective, which includes prospective interaction with other IEA Technology Collaboration Programmes such as the ones for PV, hydropower, system integration, hydrogen etc. In the new IEA Wind Task 51 (entitled "Foreacsting for the Weather Drive Energy System") the existing Work Packages (WPs) are complemented by work streams in a matrix structure. The Task is divided in three WPs according to the stakeholders: WP1 is mainly aimed at meteorologists, providing the weather forecast basis for the power forecasts. In WP2, the forecast service vendors are the main stakeholders, while the end users populate WP3. The new Task 51 started in January 2022. Planned activities include 4 workshops. The first will focus on the state of the art in forecasting for the energy system plus related research issues and be held during September 2022 in Dublin. The other three workshops will be held later during the 4-year Task period and address (1) seasonal forecasting with emphasis on Dunkelflaute, storage and hydro, (2) minute-scale forecasting, and (3) extreme power system events. The issues and conclusions of each of the workshops will be documented by a published paper. Additionally, the Recommended Practice on Forecast Solution Selection will be updated to reflect the broader perspective.

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 jacket foundations for wind turbine generators are in risk of metal fatigue at the weldedjoints due to the highly dynamic wind and wave loading. The complex multiaxial stresses occurringat the welded joints can be non­proportional and lead to increased fatigue damage as compared toproportional stresses. Furthermore, several random effects influence the response of the offshorestructures and the fatigue lives of the welded joints.

In this thesis, the fatigue response of welded joints in offshore jacket structures is assessed. The influence of non­proportional stress states on the fatigue life has been examined using experimental fatigue data from literature by modelling the published experiments using the finite element method (FEM) and assessing the stress states using the notch stress approach. The results show that a nonzero phase­shift between the governing normal and shear stress at the weld toe leads to increased damages at the weld. An approach for determining the non­proportionality penalty factors for obtaining correct fatigue life estimations has been proposed.

To quantify the level of non­proportionality in the stress states at welds a new quantification approach has been developed based on the principal component analysis (PCA). The approach is easy to implement and simple to interpret, which is often difficult for many of the already published methods. The PCA­based approach is furthermore extended to be used with variable amplitude stress states. By implementing the developed quantification approaches in the fatigue life calculation framework, it is possible to determine if non­proportionality occurs and to account for this in the fatigue life estimation automatically using the estimated penalty factors.

The stochastic finite element method (SFEM) has been used to implement approaches for considering the spatial variability occurring in the jacket structures and welds. Closed­form solutions to the stochastic stiffness and stress stiffness matrices have been proposed, making it possible to easily implement the spatial variability of the bending rigidity and other parameters in beam FE models. The matrices have been developed for both classical Euler­Bernoulli and Timoshenko beam theory and are based on the Karhunen­Loéve (KL) expansion for random field discretization. The KL expansion is then further used to formulate a stochastic size effect that takes into account that longer welds tend to fail earlier than shorter welds when considering fatigue. Other approaches for taking into account the size effect are often based on statistical evaluation of fatigue experiments which is used to determine a deterministic calibration factor. The stochastic size effect makes it possible to simulate the randomness in a full weld independently of the highest stressed zones. Using this method, the quality of the welding can be simulated and used to predict more accurate fatigue lives.

In order to design more fatigue resistant welded joints in offshore jacket structures, automatic optimization of the welded joints is required. Already published approaches to do so, often focus on only a few simple fatigue criteria. For an optimization framework to be efficient it has to take into account the complex multiaxial non­proportional fatigue and the stochastic effects of the welds. In the thesis, an optimization framework for fatigue life estimation using the developed PCA­based quantifier and the stochastic size effect has been developed. The framework is easy to use and based on simple formulations, making it possible to implement many types of fatigue criteria without having to reformulate the optimization procedure. The framework has been used to optimize the weld locations in a cast steel jacket insert and shows that considerable mass savings can be achieved by automatic
optimization.