Fishing, offshore wind energy, climate change and marine spatial planning: Is it possible to plan for a best use of space?

The significant expansion of offshore wind farms (OWF) is a core element of the world's decarbonisation strategy. However, in the urgency to meet Net Zero, care must be exercised to avoid exchanging one environmental crisis for another. A primary aim of this paper is to set out a methodology roadmap to ensure that future marine management and renewable energy policy is sustainable and evidence based. Marine ecosystems are complex, and the current lack of understanding makes it difficult to predict the effects of introducing thousands of wind turbines and extracting hundreds of gigawatts of wind energy that would have otherwise influenced our shelf seas ecosystems. It is difficult to predict the subsequent wider ecosystem effects of the combined changes in spatial use, such as displacement of fisheries out of OWF, along with possible attraction of fish into OWF developments. Therefore, to proceed with any reasonable level of certainty, we need to be able to rapidly estimate the safe upper limit of whole ecosystem effects of OWF. As an example, this perspective paper sets out the challenges which OWF pose to fishing industries within the context of existing nature conservation policies. We propose modelling approaches that can incorporate both the ecological effects of large-scale fisheries displacements as well as ecosystem level changes to fish populations from OWF developments. The ecosystem models can also predict the effects on future trends of fish populations within climate change forecasts. Practical implication. To improve decision making when balancing environmental and socio-economic benefits and trade-offs, we then propose methods that use Marine Net Gain, which is a conservation approach that ensures human activities in marine environments result in a measurable net positive impact on biodiversity. The focus is on the United Kingdom and North Sea; however, the proposed roadmap holds the capability to be transferable to other shelf sea systems with similar types and levels of pressures. This perspective provides a methodology roadmap that considers the link between, and the need for, both food and energy security from our oceans and provides a route to increased certainty in our current choices for the long-term sustainable use of our oceans.