In the Ostend declaration in 2023 the North Seas were declared Europe’s green power plant with plans for 300 GW installed capacity for offshore renewable energy by 2050. These developments on offshore renewable energy brought new attention to an old problem: How to manage our coasts sustainably under different anthropogenic pressures and interests?
The North Sea is a region, in which several economic sectors compete for space while at the same time marine protected areas and conservation measures are installed. Since the marine ecosystem is highly dynamic and interconnected, none of these sectors and their impacts can be considered independent from the others.
This keynote will explore the potential impacts that offshore wind farms have on the marine ecosystems, integrating knowledge from observations and modelling studies. In the last two decades, several studies have been published to shed more light on the potential impacts of offshore wind farms on the environment they are situated in, including atmosphere, ocean physics, and the biosphere. As these impacts act simultaneously on the same water body, the impacts will be set into context to explore their cumulative effects on the ecosystem. Thereby, Ute will discuss the importance of time and space scales and why what happens in an offshore wind farm does not stay in an offshore wind farm.
This has consequences not only for ecosystem components but needs to be discussed together with potential changes in fishing distribution and other potential co-uses to raise awareness for the expected scales of human interventions and the connectivity of the marine systems.
Bio
Ute Daewel is an expert in the field of biological-physical interactions in marine ecosystem by developing and utilizing relevant coupled model systems. Her work specifically focusses on the development of coupled biological-physical models that includes both biogeochemistry and higher trophic levels as tools to understand the natural variability in and the anthropogenic impacts on marine ecosystems.
After her PhD, Ute worked at the University of Bergen and at the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Bergen, Norway. Since 2016, she is a research scientist at the Helmholtz-Zentrum HEREON, at which she is now leading the department for Matter Transport and Ecosystem Dynamics.
In recent years a special emphasis of her own work is on understanding human impacts on marine ecosystems, including e.g., offshore renewable energy, fisheries, environmental protection measures. Her work on large scale effects of offshore wind farms on ecosystem productivity has helped draw attention to the systematic, region-wide changes we foresee under the extensive offshore wind energy plans for the North Sea.
Ute Daewel is a member of the ICES working group on Integrative, Physical-biological and Ecosystem Modelling (WGIPEM) and has co-chaired the group since 2022.
