Human Activities Thematic Assessment

Drivers of human activities in the North-East Atlantic

The extent of the human activities affecting the North-East Atlantic, and the pressures that they impose on the marine environment, are affected by multiple factors (drivers). Some of these will be specific to the activity concerned. Others are more general drivers of societal need: for example, economic development, demand for energy and food security, housing and infrastructure, societal wellbeing (such as health, culture, or recreation), and national security. In turn, these are affected by underlying drivers such as the level of economic growth (affecting demand and the ability to invest); the extent of globalisation and international trade; levels of technical innovation; societal values, including the priority given to environmental protection; population growth; and systemic shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

In past decades, such drivers have affected the scale and nature of human activities in the OSPAR Maritime Area. For example, the economic downturn of 2008 depressed shipping freight; technological innovation has facilitated the expansion of offshore wind; high levels of aggregate extraction were associated with major infrastructure projects in the Netherlands.

OSPAR has produced a standard set of high-level drivers which influence how society uses, values, and manages the North-East Atlantic. These drivers are applied in the DAPSIR framework across all thematic assessments for QSR 2023.

To explore these issues further, a scenario analysis was produced for OSPAR (Bekhuis, 2021) looking at possible future trends and developments (and uncertainties around them), which may influence economic activities in and around the North-East Atlantic. This was done by presenting four future scenarios characterised by different levels of economic growth and environmental awareness.

These scenarios are alternative storylines on what could happen. They are not the only way of describing potential futures, nor predictions of what will happen, but help to illustrate some of the most important uncertainties in the driving forces underlying the economic activities in the OSPAR area. For example:

• how will public awareness of environmental issues influence activities, for example through policy choices or consumption patterns? Will public concern be influenced by COVID-19 and / or greater awareness of climate change impacts? Might there be a move towards more localism?
• what scenarios might drive the uptake of more efficient and environmentally better technologies, and more circularity in resource use? What changing technologies and / or consumption patterns might increase pressure on the marine environment (for example, deep seabed mining for key minerals)?
• how will globalisation develop? It is plausible that free trade policies will continue to be extended by European countries, but at the same time global issues including protectionism, political tensions or rethinking of production chains could limit moves towards a more interconnected world economy;
• population growth is less uncertain than other underlying drivers. A global increase is projected between 2019 and 2030, from 7,7 billion to 8,5 billion; lower growth rates and an aging population are projected for OSPAR countries;
• the consequences of COVID-19. For example, the pandemic led to changes in consumption of single-use plastics (including littering from protective equipment), and short-term impacts in sectors such as tourism, fisheries, and aquaculture. Longer-term impacts may also persist: for example, potential effects on patterns of shipping and trade. However, the size and duration of the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, for both individual activities and society at large, are still largely uncertain. (More analysis is in the QSR third party assessment on ‘ COVID-19 impact on marine and aquatic environment and the economic dimension ’)

In some countries and OSPAR Regions, significant potential expansion is expected in the coming decades in certain activities, such as aquaculture, renewable energy production, production and consumption of plastics, or deep seabed mining. The scale of the developments in these and other activities will be sensitive to uncertainties related to the drivers described above.

Future priorities for OSPAR

In looking at how human activities may affect the marine environment in future years, OSPAR needs to recognise that the future is uncertain. OSPAR should therefore cooperate to periodically assess how key human activities, including emerging activities, and underlying drivers are changing over time, both in the past and in the future, and to help prepare OSPAR for possible alternative future developments in both the society and the environment.The scenarios work could be a reference point to help OSPAR explore to what extent its objectives will be met in the future - for example, whether certain scenarios pose particular threats, and how OSPAR could respond to different scenarios.