The North Sea is one of the world's most intensively used marine areas with limited space and increasing demands.
The Greater North Sea Basin Initiative (GNSBI) - a collaborative established in 2023 between Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the UK - wants to enhance international and cross-sectoral cooperation in maritime spatial planning (MSP) to balance various human activities while maintaining the ecological integrity of the North Sea basin.
The GNSBI wants to develop common principles and tools for cumulative impact assessments to inform decision-making at the sea-basin level and has requested advice from ICES on how to assess and manage cumulative impacts in the Greater North Sea and Celtic Seas.
And this is where ICES Workshop on Cumulative Impact Assessments (WKCIA) comes in. The goal is not just to understand today’s pressures, but to create a system flexible enough to handle what comes next.
At WKCIA, current cumulative impact assessments relevant to marine management will be compiled and evaluated, common principles to conduct cumulative impact assessments will be defined, tailored to the Greater North Sea Basin's management needs, and appropriate tools for assessing cumulative impacts in the Greater North Sea and Celtic Seas will be recommended.
If you have the relevant expertise to contribute, sign up to participate. Register by 2 May. WKCIA takes place 6–9 May 2025 in Copenhagen, Denmark and online.
Advice will be released in late-2025.
