NIVA leads new JPI Oceans and climate project
The CE2COAST project will be led by Professor Richard Bellerby, Research Coordinator at NIVA, with project partners from Belgium, France, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Portugal and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC).
Additional collaboration will be with Australian, Chinese, Chilean, UK, Danish and Swedish research institutions.
"This project is a great opportunity to deliver more realistic scenarios of ocean and coastal climate change, relevant to the spatial and temporal scales of ecosystem services, enabling the adoption of improved societal adaption and mitigation strategies," Bellerby said.
CE2COAST recognizes that global change will have significant impacts at regional and coastal scales on marine systems, dependent socioeconomic systems, ocean services and can strongly interact with regional pressures. CE2COAST will deliver transnational added value through strategically combining national expertise across oceanography, marine biogeochemistry and ecology, data and database management, earth system, marine and ecosystem modelling and science policy communication.
The primary novelty will be an observation-driven synthesis of downscaling methodology to provide better process resolution and system representations that are tailored to regional/coastal domains and associated pressures on services. It will compile and analyze new targeted, fit-for-purpose marine observations datasets from existing and new project observations of ocean climate, biogeochemistry and relevant ecological indicators.
The project will deliver Earth System Model simulations from the CMIP archive that will be downscaled for hindcasting and projecting physical and biogeochemical fields in the regional and coastal ocean providing past/future states and climate change signals. A capacity to understand and predict these impacts on regional seas and coasts is essential for developing robust strategies for adaptation and mitigation.
To inform adaptation policy to ocean and coastal change, the project will deliver key new knowledge to end-users through dissemination activities. CE2COAST will integrate stakeholder clusters in project-long decision making for co-production of relevant science products for specific scientific, management, regulatory, industrial and ocean service applicable assessments to deliver an integrated European evaluation of marine health. It will contribute knowledge crucial to reducing economic, scientific and social disparity across Europe.