MOSES: “Maritime, Ocean Sector and Ecosystem Sustainability: fostering blue growth in Atlantic marine industries” Kick of meeting at NUI Galway

NUI Galway was delighted to welcome partners from Ireland, UK, France, Spain and Portugal to NUI Galway this week for the MOSES kick off meeting.  The MOSES project is funded through the EU’s Northern Periphery & Arctic (NPA) Interreg programme.

The MOSES project will examine the ‘blue’ growth path for the sustainable development of the major sectors operating in the Atlantic space as envisaged in the Atlantic Action Plan.

The main output of this project will be to understand and quantify the sustainability dimension of Blue Growth with respect to the potential environmental impact of key strategic marine sectors, such as marine and coastal tourism, shipping and aquaculture.

The ‘Marnet’ framework will be used to estimate the size and growth of key strategic marine sectors at the regional level. This will facilitate the monitoring of progress towards the implementation of the Atlantic Strategy and the Atlantic Action Plan.  The project will also result in the development of integrated marine sustainability assessment toolkits and sustainable transition plans for key strategic marine sectors as case studies. Visualisation tools such as heat maps for vulnerability of Atlantic regions in achieving ‘blue growth’ while preserving the marine environment will also be developed. The work programme will comprise four major blocks:

(i)            Evaluate the evolution of the Atlantic marine sectors using MARNET framework.

(ii)           Examine the sectoral pressures on the Atlantic marine environment.

(iii)          Assess the physical vulnerability of coastal marine areas/features to marine activities

(iv)         Using a number of country specific case-studies, develop sustainable transition plans

to blue growth for a number of key marine industries.