Assessing risks of cumulative impacts on the Barents Sea ecosystem and its services

Informations

Funding country

Norway

Acronym

-

URL

-

Start date

1/1/2019

End date

12/31/2024

Budget

2,505,756 EUR

Fundings

Abstract

The Barents Sea is changing at a rapid pace due to a warmer ocean climate and reduced ice cover. In particular, the change has been great over the past decade. Boreal, but not arctic, species such as cod and haddock are expanding their habitats and are now found in the northern Barents Sea, since the warmer climate here provides more favorable conditions for them than before. Arctic species, on the other hand, are in decline. At the same time, less sea ice allows for increased human activity. The environmental conditions are becoming suitable for both fisheries, maritime transport and petroleum activities to expand their activity, while increasing the need for scientifically based management. In BarentsRISK, we establish a framework for assessing risk for different parts of the ecosystem from several impact factors related in particular to climate variation and change, fisheries, petroleum activity, and maritime transport, while taking into account interaction between species in the food network. We identify the most critical current and expected future impact factors with extensive participation of stakeholders from different industry sectors as well as researchers from both natural sciences and social sciences. BarentsRISK is designed to first examine qualitative relationships using surveys among academic experts and conceptual models developed together with our stakeholder group from the environment, fisheries, petroleum and maritime management, the fishing and petroleum industry and WWF. In an article that is under review in a scientific journal, we look specifically at how a flexible approach, open to different perspectives, can produce results to help set priorities in ecosystem-based management and deal with challenges related to inter-sectorial management plans across sectors with different underlying interests. The project's conceptual models summarize what we know about effects on ecosystem components from different drivers and pressures and consequences for ecosystem services and social benefits. This has been further developed, including in a recent (November 22) workshop, and will be communicated to and discussed with the project's interest group in an online meeting in December 2022. In an article, written in collaboration with another project, we analyse data on fisheries activity circumpolar in the (sub)Arctic. We show that trawling dominates Arctic fisheries and that this activity has, in response to sea ice loss rapidly expanded into Arctic shelf areas, which were previously protected by extensive ice cover. We use this further to model the development of trawling activity under a climate scenario and use the model to identify areas with a high risk of increased trawling and estimate the amount of trawling avoided due to recently established fisheries protection zones. The project also focuses on more quantitative relationships, i.e., different mathematical and statistical models to explain interactions between pressures and different parts of the ecosystem. The methods we use include food web analysis, statistical analysis of variation in space and time of physical variables and different species and human impact factors, and studies of different scenarios using the dynamic ecosystem model NoBa Atlantis. A PhD candidate employed at IMR by the project received additional funding from the Research Council of Norway to collaborate with the world's foremost expert on the Atlantis model and is now in Australia learning a lot of new things that will be applied in the last part of her doctoral thesis.