Early-warning system: Climate-smart spatial management of UK fisheries, aquaculture and conservation

Our coast and our ocean are undergoing unprecedented changes as a result of the breakdown of our global climate system. These changes represent a significant challenge to the delivery of marine policy that effectively protects ecosystem health, biodiversity and the communities depending on these resources.2 Creating new, climateadaptive management strategies for these ecosystems, and for economic sectors reliant on them, is thus an ongoing challenge facing diverse arine policy frameworks across the UK Nations. This is compounded by an ever-increasing reliance on marine space to meet our need to transition to greener energy supply and economic growth, which have to be carefully balanced against the pressing need to preserve our marine species and habitats, and their ability to adapt to climate change. Marine planning is a public process to document, consult and set priorities about how we manage and share our marine space.
Indeed, across our Nations, marine plans thus far enshrine key policies that set out the ambition to deliver climate change adaptation. As a devolved process, operating at national and regional level, marine planning has the potential to serve a key, harmonizing role. It can bring together our broader marine policy mechanisms to help tackle the impacts of global climate change across our waters. Additionally, because planning is a deeply consultative process, it further
offers the potential to ensure the voices of those that are affected by marine plans help shape this journey. In order to harness opportunities for effective marine conservation and economic growth that emerge from spatial variation
in the sensitivity of our marine ecosystems to climate change, climate-smart marine plans are necessary. However, key capability gaps have this far hindered the ability of UK Nations to deliver such marine plans; i.e. plans that are truly adaptive to the effects of climate change. In this report, we begin to close these gaps. First, we explore areas where policy mechanisms could be strengthened to deliver on this ambition. Second, we capitalize on world-class UK ocean climate modelling capability, to deliver a climate change assessment for the entire UK EEZ that, for the first time, demonstrates the spatial variation in sensitivity of our marine ecosystems to climate change. Third, we make recommendations about how marine planning could support the management of areas identified as climate change refugia for three key sectors – marine conservation, fisheries and aquaculture. We highlight that these areas could be utilized by future climate-smart policy design, to promote the climate change adaptation of our natural marine ecosystems. Our identification of these areas also offers opportunities for sectoral policy design by highlighting where risk from climate change may be lower for our fishing and aquaculture sectors.