Addressing Sustainability Transition Pathways in the Blue Economy

Oceans are a life-support system for human societies.

They supply fundamental goods such as fish food, materials, energy and provide benefits associated with our well-being, they form cultural values and contribute to jobs creation and trade.

The development of national ocean development plans combined with Blue Growth (BG) strategies are turning the ocean into a new frontier of industrial development. In fact, the EU's Blue Economy produces a turnover of 750 billion euro/year.

However, the actual sustainability of this Blue Acceleration process remain to a large extent uncertain, due to 1) an unclear interpretation of the concept of ""Blue Growth"" across different policies, the 2) multiple human pressures across scales and marine regions cause ecological degradation with high social costs and 3) the lack of integrated methodologies that can capture the effects of the BG trends on oceans health and human well-being over spatio-temporal scales.

There is an urgent need for interdisciplinary approaches that can address the pathways of sustainable transitions in marine realms and the deriving benefits and costs to society and the environment.

Blue-Paths aims to 1) develop an integrated human-ocean framework for BG; 2) identify environmental and socio-economic effects of pathways of sustainable transitions on the use of ocean?s ecosystem goods and services and 3) deliver new knowledge on the management and planning of ocean resource.

To do so, Blue-Paths will couple a marine socio-ecological system (SES) framework with an Ensemble Machine Learning (ML) technique to simulate the spatio-temporal environmental and socio-economic effects on the marine SES induced by pervasive ocean technologies. This is of high practical value, as it will be tested on the 2050 ecological transition plan of Spain.

Blue-Paths framework combined with ML techniques will provide innovative tools to monitor the sustainable use of the ocean space and foster adaptive management of marine resources.