Facilitating Ocean Recovery in a Changing climatE: barriers, surprises and windows of opportunity (FORCE)

The United Nations has pledged to protect ⅓ of all land and sea and restore ⅕ of degraded ecosystems by 2030.

Meeting this urgent challenge, however, requires identifying and breaking ecological and societal barriers that hinder the implementation of effective actions that also increase adaptation to climate change.

The transdisciplinary FORCE project will in collaboration with stakeholders identify the most effective management actions for reversing biodiversity loss and increasing resilience to climate change of the Baltic Sea coast.

This ecosystem is increasingly pressured by a spatially propagating sea-to-coast regime shift involving overfishing, habitat loss and accelerated warming.

We will i) combine 40-years of biodiversity, societal and climate data to assess how climate change and local pressures have contributed to the Baltic coastal regime shift, ii) use a Living Labs stakeholder engagement approach to identify effective measures and the social-ecological and legal barriers that hinder, and opportunities that enable, their large-scale implementation, iii) test if protection and restoration of food webs can reverse the regime shift, and iv) explore data- and expert-driven scenarios of near-future climate and biodiversity management, to assess the potential for true ecosystem-based management to increase adaptation to, and mitigation of, climate change.

Our Living Lab helps facilitate rapid spread of results to governing bodies, policy organizations and society.