Sheila Heymans
Executive Director
European Marine Board
Belgium
Paula Kellett
Science Officer
European
Marine Board
Belgium
The European Green Deal outlines a vision for a green future in Europe, and the steps for achieving this transition. Its vision for a net zero Europe by 2050 is very ambitious and will challenge us all.
Given the scale of this vision, no one sector, discipline or country can deliver the green transition alone. Such a vision requires us to look beyond our own science, our own policy area, or our own country, and collaborate. A green transition is inherently complex. We need to fundamentally reconsider how we use the Ocean to ensure clean energy and energy security, to provide sustainable and safe food, and give people access to clean and accessible transport, while also ensuring that we leave a legacy of a sustainable Ocean for our children. Achieving this requires collaboration on an equally grand scale, working beyond our traditional silos to a far greater extent than we have done to date. We need to link research with industry, policy, and with communities. Knowing who to work with, and how to work with them, is not straightforward, as different fields have their own ‘language’, processes, and norms. Developing best practice for such wide-ranging collaboration will require dedicated research within the discipline of Sustainability Science.
Achieving the Green Deal will affect how everyone in Europe lives, but not achieving the Green Deal will also affect how everyone in Europe lives. For this reason, the green transition should also be a just transition, leaving nobody behind. All stakeholders should have the opportunity to engage in developing green solutions to those fundamental challenges, as those solutions will also have an impact on everyone. We want to move forward to a green future while also preserving maritime jobs, and the maritime culture and heritage that are so intrinsic to European life. Ensuring that everyone’s voices are heard and reflected in the developments to come will be key.
A green transition will also require compromise. The transition will not be truly green if, for example, green and net-zero emission maritime industries are achieved at a disproportionate cost to coastal communities and the marine environment. Balancing the sometimes-contradictory requirements for those different aspects (e.g. Green Deal ambitions as well as the Blue Economy strategy, the Marine Strategy Framework Directive and the new Nature Restoration Law) will require us to innovate. In doing so, we should challenge our own understanding of ‘the way things are’, to consider ‘the way things could be’. But how do we know when we have achieved this balance? We will only know that if we have a comprehensive, well-funded and sustained Ocean observing system that provides open data for analysis by all, and if we have a comprehensive platform such as the Digital Twin of the Ocean where we can ask what-if questions, based on well described scenarios and real data, to address these management challenges.
Marine space within European waters is in increasingly high demand as we seek to support our green transition with the resources (e.g. renewable energy and food) the Ocean can supply whilst also maintaining other key maritime activities and protecting the marine environment. The new Nature Restoration Law will make the management of our marine space even more critical, and the need for equitable resource allocation will become even more difficult. Here again, a key challenge will be to collaborate and innovate, looking towards multi-use and complementarity between activities, to make the best use of the space available.
Training will underpin our ability to deliver on a just and all-encompassing green transition. We will need to ensure that we have the right people with the right knowledge and skills across all career levels and maritime sectors to ensure we can achieve the visions we have set out. We will need to identify and nurture the new skills needed and ensure that green jobs in the blue sector are promoted and valued, and that people currently working in those maritime industries that do not fit our new vision can retrain and become part of the green future.
The title of this column is ‘key challenges of science-policy collaboration in supporting green transition,’ but really, the key challenge is that those collaborations need to be much, much broader to achieve the grand vision of a green future.
For more information, contact info@marineboard.eu