With a coming race for space driven by the rapid upscaling of offshore wind, marine area will increasingly become a resource priced at a premium. By supporting co-existence among ocean users, MARCO (MARine CO-existence scenario building) will provide novel insights for marine spatial planning and early-stage project development.
Taken together as the ‘Blue Economy’, offshore energy, fishing and aquaculture, shipping, coastal tourism, pipelines, and cabling and more, all require space that is increasingly in short supply. To meet the ambitions for offshore renewables set out by the EU while at the same time contributing to the UN Sustainable Development Goal 14: Life Below Water, this coming race for space must be carefully managed to reduce the burden on marine ecosystems. There is a need for new tools to ensure strategic marine spatial planning that addresses future scenarios for co-existence among stakeholders.
A toolbox to aid planning and build trust
The MARCO project will build scenarios by coupling spatial GIS-based analyses with system dynamics modelling. The planned result is a toolbox to be used for strategic decision support and in stakeholder dialogues relating to offshore developments and marine spatial planning.
MARCO goes beyond existing planning structures and is unique in the way it will combine spatial and temporal analysis and how it will allow project partners and other ocean stakeholders to interactively explore different scenarios for coexistence that they have jointly defined. It aims to provide transparency and trust in consenting processes through establishing a common knowledge base among ocean stakeholders, enabling them to resolve goal conflicts, identify synergies, and negotiate win-win solutions.
DNV is the project coordinator. The Institute of Marine Research, Salmar Aker Ocean, Mainstream Renewable Power, and the Norwegian Fishermen’s Association are partners in the project. Two use cases relating to key uncertainties in offshore wind and offshore aquaculture have been defined by the consortium and will be used to test the framework developed by the project.
The benefits
MARCO will benefit developers and operators of offshore wind and aquaculture projects, and other stakeholders affected by plans in these sectors. The involvement of a wide range of ocean stakeholders in exploring future scenarios means that the tools developed in MARCO will strengthen knowledge sharing and collaboration across the Blue Economy. For developers, this results in reduced stakeholder-related risk and a stronger ‘social licence to operate’. On a societal level, the MARCO toolbox contributes to managing trade-offs between society’s ambitions related to energy, food, climate, and nature.
Market potential
MARCO represents a novel approach to decision support and stakeholder dialogue in marine spatial planning and early project phases. The models and frameworks being developed will provide robust and transparent decision support for marine spatial planning and consenting processes.
The offshore developers and operators using MARCO will gain competitive advantage as the knowledge-based and stakeholder-inclusive approach can be used to more speedily understand the wider impacts of proposed developments, to agree upon necessary actions, and to enable trust in the final outcomes. MARCO can be scaled and adapted to different regions and international settings.
