Adapting Coastal Zone Management to Ocean Acidification

Informations

Funding country

Norway

Acronym

-

URL

-

Start date

1/1/2016

End date

12/31/2019

Budget

954,234 EUR

Fundings

Abstract

The goal of this project has been to study how sustainable governance of the coastal areas may help mitigate the negative consequences of ocean acidification. There is a general lack of knowledge about the ocean acidification (OA) processes and impacts in coastal waters. If this knowledge is to be applicable to coastal zone management, it needs to be co-produced with the people who are going to apply it. Therefore, the researchers in the project have cooperated closely with stakeholders involved in coastal zone management. In 2016, three stakeholder input workshops were organized: two in Bergen and Rosendal for the case in Sunnhordland and one in Leknes for the Lofoten case. These were followed up by three case-vise scenario workshops in the autumn of 2017. This approach to co-production of knowledge has now been published in a scientific article. As an indicator of the relevance of the last point, Vestvågøy Municipality (the Lofoten case area) have included the OA-model results from Buksnesfjorden in a new municipal plan for sewage and wastewater. The stations that the project established in the fjord will also be used in a new monitoring program. In the final year of the project, the researchers have assessed two models for how to incorporate OA into coastal zone management, either as a part of the municipal coastal zone planning or as a part of water management under the water framework directive. The latter would require that OA is defined as a water quality issue at the national level, or preferably at the EU-level. On the basis of the work done to assess the current coastal zone management and the discussion about OA impacts from the workshops and interviews, the project concludes that the latter option is the most feasible approach to managing coastal OA. We also discuss the potential for adaptive co-management (ACM) as a framework for managing coastal OA, as a supplement to water management. Adaptive co-management is appropriate for OA where the need for knowledge generation and governing is particularly pressing and where the inclusion of multiple stakeholders enables the management approaches to complex non-linear issues. Also, it requires much more comprehensive stakeholder participation than today?s coastal management. The result of our analysis of how OA should be managed is included in three journal articles. One of these is submitted, and two are still in progress. Also, our recommendations based on this work is published in a policy brief. Within ACIDCOAST, NIVA has developed a new 800m-resolution marine physical-biogeochemical model (ROHO800) for the coastal ocean/fjord region centred on Hardangerfjord (Rogaland-Hordaland, Figure1). This includes the southern case study region (Kvinnheradsfjord). This model has now been successfully run for a hindcast period (2002-2015). Ideally, we would like to downscale global changes to the fjords by running high-res coastal models such as ROHO800 continuously into the future. However, this presents several difficulties regarding computational costs and the production of bias-corrected forcings and boundary conditions for the projections. The use a high-resolution fjord model yields crucial new information on the seasonality of coastal acidification, which in turn can lead to revised estimates of the years when ?critical thresholds? are crossed. In our case, for example, projections derived from the fjord model using a delta change approach predicted that the water at 10 m in Kvinnheradsfjord will become seasonally undersaturated with respect to aragonite (wintertime ?(ar)<1) during 2030-2040; using only the basin-scale model, the water at 10 m remains perennially supersaturated beyond 2050. The model will be presented in a scientific article under preparation. In regard to the northern case study region, we have developed a kelp-urchin dynamical model to study the regrowth of kelp forest under climate change and ocean acidification. This model has been used to project the impacts of climate change and ocean acidification on urchin harvest yield and optimal harvesting restrictions. This work has been presented in a submitted journal article and is also included in an article included in the AMAP OA report published in 2018. Results from the project regarding the improved understanding of the response of coastal Norway to ocean acidification have been incorporated into an evaluation of habitat changes for benthic species on Arctic Shelves (article submitted). An evaluation of the Acidcoast process, in community decision-making in targeting habitat evaluations for coastal Norway identified that coproduction of knowledge resulted in more informed, relevant simulations of ocean acidification, is also under preparation as an article. In March, Researchers from Norway and Scotland met in Edinburgh for a successful workshop on this topic. A workshop report has been produced, and a scientific article has been submitted.