BlueForesting- Climate Resilient Marine Forests for a Sustainable Future
Centro Interdisciplinar de Investigação Marinha e Ambiental ·Portugal
About this project
<p style="text-align: justify"><span style="font-size: 10pt"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif"><em><span style="font-size: 11pt"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", sans-serif">The ocean provides vital ecosystem services, threatened by anthropogenic and climate change (CC) pressures. Their undesirable impacts can be mitigated if ecosystem-based management, adaptive marine spatial planning, and habitat restoration strategies are implemented. BLUEFORESTING builds upon these approaches to provide CC ready nature-based solutions (NBS) to successfully manage the most iconic coastal habitats, Marine Seaweed Forests. Although threatened, these ecosystems are biodiversity-rich, recognized as cost-effective NBS with potential to mitigate CC effects. Their capacity to deliver key ecosystem services and support blue growth makes them blue infrastructures. Fostering healthy marine forests means promoting regional fisheries, recreational activities, and cultural traditions while fighting biodiversity loss and CC. In this context, BLUEFORESTING will develop science-based guidance to foster sustainable and healthy marine forests by assessing baseline information (e.g., genetics, processes, functions, services), and identifying climate refugia areas. BLUEFORESTING models and tools will provide vulnerability assessments to co-develop effective and climate ready NBS. Expected results are of paramount importance to support future marine protection and reforestation actions in a cost-effective and sustainable way. BLUEFORESTING aligns with the EU Blue Growth agenda as it proposes sustainable ecosystem-based management actions that can help proactively protect and increase the resilience of marine forests under CC, guaranteeing the provision of associated services. BLUEFORESTING represents an excellent opportunity to prove how science-based governance may promote the sustainability of marine habitats and services. The established partnership will promote bilateral knowledge transfer and dissemination, strengthening international cooperation and cooperation while increasing value creation and sustainable growth in the Portuguese blue economy.</span></span></em> </span></span></p>
Bilateral cooperation results
The BlueForesting consortium was designed to include marine laboratories with complementary expertise, significantly enhancing potential collaboration between partners. Donor and recipient countries have jointly participated in the project activities, united by a common vision that has led to impactful and transformative scientific outcomes and management tools. For example, NIVA has world-class expertise in modelling and climate research. As part of Blueforesting, NIVA developed regional, downscaled projections of climate change for various RCP scenarios. These projections were then integrated into the Blueforesting vulnerability assessments and used extensively in the project's climate scenarios. Another successful collaboration with the NIVA was relative to their expertise in environmental economics for the development of a choice experiment study. This study jointly coordinated by NIVA and CIIMAR, aimed to determine the preferences of the Portuguese population and their marginal willingness to pay (WTP) for supporting conservation and restoration measures related to the marine forests in northern Portugal. The collaboration between the Portuguese institutions and Akvaplan-NIVA has also been instrumental in advancing the technical aspects of the reforestation effort. Common laboratory experiments have been carried out on the thermal tolerance of common kelp species and nursery techniques. Several exchanges of students/researchers were feasible thanks to Blueforesting, Bianca Reis (CIIMAR) and Joao Franco (IPL) visited NIVA in summer 2022 for ecosystem functioning research in Norway and Sofia Chan (CIIMAR) did a short internship at Akvaplan NIVA in 2023 to develop thermal tolerance experiments.
Project partners
- Norwegian Institute for Water Research Donor project partner· Norway
- AKVAPLAN-niva AS Donor project partner· Norway
- Polytechnic Institute of Leiria Project partner· Portugal
- BIOPOLIS Association Project partner· Portugal
- CASULO UNIPESSOAL LDA Project partner· Portugal