The aim of this project is to find out how the expansion of offshore wind in the North Sea is and will be effecting the currently established socio-ecological system, and to decipher their potential to generate conflicts between different marine uses.

One intended project outcome is to identify and/or predict newly emergent features of the system, such as unseen effects on other marine users or the environment. Another is to be able to make Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) recommendations based on the results obtained, ultimately fostering resilience and boosting sustainability of the North Sea system.

To achieve these outcomes, socio-ecological data - which pertain here to social, economic and ecological subsystems - will at first be gathered at the local scale, along a stretch of the North East coast of England. This will be in the forms of existing monitoring data for physical and some social variables, and in stakeholder and local community interviews to understand local scale system linkages, interactions and tensions.

Features will then be applied into a conceptual model of the socio-ecological system, with changes that arise from local wind power development included, before system complexity and predictive capacity are improved by integrating in a suite of known complex systems models. The local model will then be used to inform targeted collation of macro-scale data on the physical, ecological and social environment of the North Sea. This macro-data will then be applied to the local model, before the model is ran to test its predictive ability for the North Sea socio-ecological system, by use of historical data. The model accuracy will then be improved by altering, adding, or subtracting certain linkages and agents to reflect any complexities that are not shared between the local and regional scales. The projected expansion of offshore wind energy will then be applied to the model to discover emergent system impacts, such as changes to ocean food webs, biogeochemical cycles, coastal population dynamics and how offshore wind may benefit or detriment other marine sectors such as fisheries and tourism.

The overall goal is to use these findings to have a positive influence on MSP in the North Sea.

This project aims to be truly interdisciplinary, meaning appropriate credence will be given to all aspects of the system, unlike in the majority of similar projects that tend to over-value either the economic, social or the ecological subsystems. Because of these equitable considerations, the resultant MSP recommendations would not only benefit offshore wind, but many other marine users too. Specifically, the knowledge generated from this project will be used to anticipate stakeholder conflicts in the increasingly crowded North Sea region, and suggest MSP interventions that help to control or mitigate them.