Coastal HF radars in the Mediterranean: Applications in support of science priorities and societal needs

The Mediterranean Sea is a prominent climate change hot spot, being their socio-economically vital coastal areas the most vulnerable targets for maritime safety, diverse met-ocean hazards and marine pollution. Providing an unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution at wide coastal areas, High-frequency radars (HFRs) have been steadily gaining recognition as an effective land-based remote sensing technology for a continuous monitoring of the surface circulation, increasingly waves and occasionally winds. HFR measurements have boosted the thorough scientific knowledge of coastal processes, also fostering a broad range of applications, which has promoted their integration in the Coastal Ocean Observing Systems worldwide, with more than half of the European sites located in the Mediterranean coastal areas. In this work, we present a review of existing HFR data multidisciplinary science-based applications in the Mediterranean Sea, primarily focused on meeting end-users and science-driven requirements, addressing regional challenges in three main topics: i) maritime safety; ii) extreme hazards; iii) environmental transport process. Additionally, the HFR observing and monitoring regional capabilities in the Mediterranean region required to underpin the underlying science and the further development of applications are also analyzed. The outcome of this assessment has allowed us to finally provide a set of recommendations for the future improvement prospects to maximize the contribution in extending the science-based HFR products into societal relevant downstream services to support the blue growth in the Mediterranean coastal areas, helping to meet the UN’s Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development and the EU’s Green Deal goals.

From Life in the Sea to the Clinic: The Marine Drugs Approved and under Clinical Trial

In the last decades Blue Growth policy in european and non-european countries produced a great impulse in applied marine sciences, comprehending the research of new bioactive molecules in marine organisms. These organisms are a great source of natural compounds with unique features resulting from the huge variability of marine habitats and species living in them. Most of the marine compounds in use and in clinical trials are drugs for cancer therapy and many of them are conjugated to antibody to form antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs). Severe pain, viral infections, hypertriglyceridemia, obesity, Alzheimer’s and other CNS diseases are further target conditions for these pharmaceuticals. This review summarizes the state-of-the-art marine drugs focusing on the most successful results in the fast expanding field of marine pharmacology.

Community Development Quotas and Support of Small-Scale Fisheries as Two Key Concepts for Blue Growth in Fisheries

Blue Growth has become one of the key topics of ocean management. It is defined as a holistic framework for an environmentally friendly and socio-economically sustainable development of ocean-related activities with a special emphasis on technological innovation. Capture fisheries are widely considered to have no substantial growth potential and consequently are not subject to the European Union’s Blue Growth strategy. In our review, we, however, argue that capture fisheries should play an essential role in national Blue Growth strategies. We identified two interconnected management strategies to foster Blue Growth in fisheries, a) the implementation of Community Development Quota (CDQ) systems and b) the support of small-scale fisheries (SSF). They hold the potential to benefit fishery-dependent coastal communities and therefore counteract consolidations in the fishing sector. Additionally, they provide the possibility to improve quota access for small-scale fishermen. Besides having better access to quota, the future of SSF depends on sources of public funding for technical improvement and innovation as well as increased representation in the management. In this perspective, we present different cases that successfully implemented CDQs (the Alaska pollock fishery) or have considerable potential to implement CDQ programs or improve their current approaches (United Kingdom, Ireland, and Iceland). We further discuss examples for successful management strategies to support SSF directly. If these aspects are considered in a Blue Growth strategy, the survival of fishery-dependent communities could be assured, and SSF could develop from predominantly part-time or subsistence fisheries to a full-time occupation. By those means, they would be part of a fostering Blue Economy and strengthen environmentally friendly and socio-economically sustainable fishing practices in Europe.

Improvement of Maritime Management as a Key Aspect of Sustainable Development and Blue Growth in the Russian Federation

The conservation and sustainable use of oceans, seas and marine resources has been declared by the United Nations as one of 17 priority Sustainable Development Goals. At present, most of the maritime states are striving to improve the efficiency of their use of marine resources, including sea space. In particular, the European Union is implementing a number of projects related to the implementation of marine spatial planning (MSP) tools. The Baltic Sea is considered as a pilot region, where a pan-Baltic coordinated MSP plan has been developed to provide for sustainable development and blue growth in the marine and coastal economy. The Russian Federation is one of the Baltic countries, but the MSP procedure at the state level does not have institutional and regulatory support, which requires the elimination of gaps and additional development of the maritime management system. The laws of the organization and development of the general theory of management are used in this study. An Integrated Management Model for sustainable marine and coastal use is proposed as a tool for ensuring blue growth, including four interrelated elements (specific management functions), namely “Integrated Coastal Zone Management”, “Marine Spatial Planning”, “Management of Marine Macroregion” and “Ocean Governance”. Their functional content and interaction mechanisms are discussed in order to implement an integral approach to marine use. The vertical structure of the proposed integral model includes three levels corresponding to the federal and regional levels of government and the level of municipal self-governance. The use of the integral model should help accelerate the process of introducing and using MSP instruments in the process of strategic planning in the socio-economic development of the Russian coastal territories.

Portfolios, programs, and projects in strategic marine-fisheries sustainability and blue growth: a case study in Indonesia

The purpose of the study was to design the development of creative and sustainable solutions to critical problems of marine and fisheries through Portfolio, Programme and Project Management Maturity Model (P3M3) in order to execute strategic marine-fisheries sustainability and blue growth: a case study in Indonesia. This model can help marine-fisheries businesses deconstruct the problems of existing industries and create a new (innovative) policy based on the alignment of macro level (portfolio management), meso level (programme management) and micro level (project management) by providing superior value of Triple Bottom Line (economic-social-deep ecological environment) to the stakeholders and the generations for today and future forevermore.

Coastal tourism, market segmentation and contested landscapes

Governments are increasingly adopting Blue Growth strategies as a means of promoting economic development. Although Blue Growth offers development opportunities, from a local perspective it is often concentrated in inaccessible sectors or has negative impacts on coastal communities and landscapes. We argue that to be of use to local communities, tourist experiences of coastal landscapes need to be understood from a community-led, rather than market-led, perspective. Tourist market segmentation can help reveal such experiences but has predominately been used in a narrow, econometric way by the tourism industry, market researchers and policymakers. These approaches often fail to capture the innate experiential nature of coastal tourism and often result in the production of coastal tourism that is unsympathetic to community landscape perspectives and values. To address this gap, this paper adopts an experiential tourist segmentation approach based on community experiences of coastal landscapes. Applied to data collected from a tourist survey on the west coast of Ireland, we identify five landscape experiences: well-being experiences; conscientious travel experiences; nature experiences; coastal change experiences; and cultural experiences. Based on these experiences, four alternative tourist segments were identified, with significant alignment to communities around sustainable, ethical and locally sensitised forms of tourism, as follows: Blue Health Seekers; Nature Escapers; Pristine Seekers; and Heritage Explorers. The paper concludes by arguing that adopting more experiential and dialogical approaches to market segmentation will identify tourist and communities’ perspectives in ways that are compatible and will reveal opportunities for more inclusive and locally accessible forms of Blue Growth.