6. We Benefit from a Healthy Ocean: Clean, Biologically Diverse and Productive Seas

What the North-East Atlantic provides us

The ocean that surrounds us is what unites OSPAR Contracting Parties. It is part of our history, our economies, and our way of life. We rely on it for food, to help regulate our climate, for energy and raw materials, as a source of recreation and inspiration, and to support millions of jobs across our region.

We rely on the ocean for food, for energy, as a source of recreation, and to support millions of jobs across our region © Shutterstock

The value of the North-East Atlantic is directly related to its biological richness. It is home to a vast range of marine biodiversity and contains globally important populations of many marine species. Its strategic location as well as its resource wealth is such that it supports a host of economically and culturally important maritime industries, recreational activities and local livelihoods, while contributing to the vitality of the global ocean and the planet itself. The OSPAR Maritime Area has well over 100 000 kilometres of coastline and covers more than 13,5 million km². Societies here benefit from its exceptional marine productivity and range of resources, which support livelihood opportunities in fisheries and aquaculture; provide suitable space for renewable energy, transport, and trade; supply minerals and materials to support other maritime and land-based activities; and act as the cultural core for the coastal communities inexorably linked to the area’s seas.

Recognising societies’ dependence on a healthy ocean, the QSR 2023, for the first time, has considered the benefits that healthy, functioning marine ecosystems provide and has begun to ascertain how changes in pressures and state affect the delivery of ecosystem services. The ecosystem services considered in the QSR are presented in Figure 6.1. While the QSR 2023 has maintained the systematic tracking of human activities or pressures in the OSPAR Maritime Area and the reporting on the current status of ecosystem components, for the first time its assessments now also reflect preliminary knowledge of how changes in individual components (pressures and states) can result in changes to ecosystem service delivery.

While there has been no region-wide systematic assessment of ecosystem services and the economic values derived from them, it is indisputable that our marine ecosystems are critical to expanding the blue economies of OSPAR’s Contracting Parties. Marine capture fisheries contribute to GDP and food security, create livelihood opportunities and provide the foundation for cultural and culinary traditions. Aquaculture is a growth industry in the majority of OSPAR Regions and is highly reliant on healthy marine environments to produce safe, profitable, and highly valued products. The biodiversity of the North-East Atlantic also supports growing recreation and tourism industries, while contributing to the delivery of the supporting and regulating services that underpin aesthetic and amenity values and reduce risk to infrastructure and property. The marine environments in the OSPAR Maritime Area also provide space and resources for other maritime industries including renewable energy, minerals, shipping and transport, and many of the marine habitats mitigate the effects of carbon emissions through carbon sequestration.

Embedding ecosystem services into the assessment of quality status of the marine environment enables better understanding and management of the causes and consequences of change, in terms of both environmental impact and the impact on human welfare, and the degree to which society’s needs are being met. This integrated approach makes it possible to identify and take action on influences which are critical to the health and integrity of marine ecosystems, while achieving sustainable use of ecosystem goods and services (including natural capital assets).

How sustainable is ocean use?

Continuing to reap the economic and environmental benefits, and maintaining the cultural and spiritual values, that the seas provide requires that they be used sustainably. The OSPAR Contracting Parties have collectively and individually shown progress in that direction, although that progress has been mixed.

Maritime activities have been increasing throughout the OSPAR Maritime Area, with aquaculture, renewable energy and tourism increasing substantially in the last ten years in most OSPAR Regions and aggregate extraction, agriculture, oil and gas extraction and shipping remaining stable. Management has in many, but not all, cases kept pace with the increases in maritime industry and the impacts of collective pressures on marine ecosystems. Pollution regulations have been enacted across all regions. The controls on pressures from shipping include regulations limiting nitrogen and sulphur emissions, oil pollution, release of ballast water and biofouling. There is now improved understanding and implementation of measures to mitigate the pollution pressures from aquaculture, including better modelling of impacts, and standards to limit escapes of farmed fish and sea-lice infestation. The planned reforms to agricultural policy could provide incentives to further reduce pollution pressures such as the release of nutrients that lead to eutrophication, and of pesticides. Many measures have been introduced to reduce plastic waste, including restrictions on single-use plastic items and fishing gear, new provisions for port reception facilities and measures to tackle pollution from microplastics. Environmental assessments and permitting of offshore wind installations consider issues such as the siting of turbines (e.g. in relation to bird displacement and collision risk) and the regulation of noise from construction and operations. Aquaculture, renewable energy and tourism are expected to increase substantially in the coming years, while future trends in fisheries and shipping are uncertain but likely to increase in some parts of the OSPAR Maritime Area.

Maritime activities have been increasing throughout the OSPAR Maritime Area, with aquaculture, renewable energy and tourism increasing substantially in the last ten years © Shutterstock

The QSR 2023 assessments have shown that usage of the OSPAR Maritime Area has continually increased since the last QSR (2010), and that its regions and sub-regions continue to experience multiple pressures from a wide range of human activities. These are particularly intense in parts of the Greater North Sea, Celtic Seas and Bay of Biscay and Iberian Coast Regions. While levels of activity are lower in the Arctic Waters and Wider Atlantic Regions, increases in some activities are likely to pose greater risks there in the future. This is due to the fact that climate change exacerbates other pressures at high latitudes in particular.

All activities covered in this QSR exert pressures on the marine environment. For example, agriculture is a significant source of the nutrients that contribute to eutrophication; fisheries influence ecosystems through the removal of target and non-target species and by disturbing the seabed; multiple activities are sources of contaminants and litter, or provide routes for the introduction and spread of non-indigenous species; shipping noise is a significant pressure in heavily used areas such as the Greater North Sea; and new or increasing activities, such as offshore renewable energy or potential deep seabed mining, bring additional pressures. Added stress from the pressure of climate change compounds the impacts of these activities and may further weaken ecosystem resilience. However, not all these pressures and their impacts are felt equally across the OSPAR Maritime Area (Figure 6.2), and different responses may be needed in different Regions.

The main anthropogenic pressures originating from these activities (as well as other activities on land and sea) differ in each Region, and sensitivities to impact also show regional variation.

Management for sustainability

The intensity and geographic extent of activities do not tell the whole story, of course. Many maritime industries and activities are regulated and managed so that the pressures on the marine ecosystems where they operate are greatly reduced individually, but the cumulative pressures are problematic. The management measures taken by Contracting Parties and knowledge of how to implement them have increased since QSR 2010. Management and regulations have shown results: emissions and discharges from the oil and gas industry have been reduced; there has been a significant decrease in litter on the beaches of most OSPAR Regions; air pollution from shipping has decreased (although with  a resulting increase in discharges to water through exhaust-gas cleaning systems), as have incidents of oil pollution; progressive and substantial reductions in discharges of radioactive substances and concentrations of radioactive substances in the environment are close to historical or background levels; and eutrophication has declined in many sub-regions.

In some cases, such as the large projected increase in offshore renewable energy, the development of management measures and assessment of their success, as well as the analysis of cumulative impacts, is relatively new. Judging the effectiveness of management measures (in terms of reducing environmental pressures and in cost-effectiveness) requires assessment over many years and a well-balanced approach to cumulative assessment, and this will remain an important area in which to develop OSPAR capacity in the future.  

One area in which working together has clearly strengthened responses is the common ambition to build a regionally coherent and well-managed marine protected area (MPA) network, and in this regard OSPAR Contracting Parties have taken strong actions to protect marine biodiversity. The 2003 OSPAR Recommendation on MPAs has catalysed an expansion of their network. As of October 2021, the OSPAR network of MPAs numbered 583, including eight collectively designated in ABNJs, with a total surface area of 1 490 552 km², accounting for 10,8% of the OSPAR Maritime Area. These protected areas offer protection for the 18 benthic habitats listed as of particular concern by OSPAR as well as threatened marine bird, mammal, fish and turtle species.

Other activities, especially rapidly growing industries, may call for additional measures. For instance, aquaculture may need additional actions to reduce the risks of NIS introduction, disease, contamination and eutrophication. Similarly, although an increasingly large proportion of commercial fish stocks is fished at levels consistent with MSY, fishing intensity is still very high in continental shelf areas throughout the OSPAR Maritime Area and further expansion may occur in response to both future demand and climate change-driven population shifts. Given that fishing-related pressures impact biota beyond the targeted stocks, additional fisheries management measures taking an ecosystem perspective, and measures to protect vulnerable habitats and species, must be instituted.

Figure 6.3: Map of some of the Activities in the OSPAR Maritime Area

Looking at these problems one at a time, or addressing pressures and threats through siloed sectoral management, can be ineffective. This is why OSPAR continues to aim at applying an ecosystem approach to the management of human activities, even if implementation is challenging. Within OSPAR, the ecosystem approach is defined as “the comprehensive integrated management of human activities based on the best available scientific knowledge about the ecosystem and its dynamics, in order to identify and take action on influences which are critical to the health of marine ecosystems, thereby achieving sustainable use of ecosystem goods and services and maintenance of ecosystem integrity”. In the future, OSPAR will apply the ecosystem approach and work coherently towards even more holistic solutions to the problems addressed by the OSPAR Strategy.

The QSR 2023 Looks Forward

OSPAR devotes significant attention to monitoring changes in human activities and their attendant effects, so as to provide a systematic method for considering the existing and potential impact of activities on ecosystems in a standardised way. OSPAR is also striving to improve its understanding of the drivers behind activities that affect the marine environment, and to develop scenarios of plausible futures. These scenarios – alternative storylines about what could happen – are not the only way to describe potential futures, nor are they predictions, but they do help to illustrate some of the most important uncertainties around the driving forces underlying the economic activities in the OSPAR area.

These uncertainties are captured in four different storylines relating to the future scenarios:

1. Consuming Economy;
2. Big Blue Economy;
3. Economies of Individuals; and
4. Small Blue Economies.

The scenario formulation helps to better understand how economic growth and environmental education could affect outcomes (Figure 6.4).