EGU25-19807, updated on 15 Mar 2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-19807
EGU General Assembly 2025
© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Investigating and Modeling the Making of the EU Digital Twin of the Ocean
Carolin Hirt and Alice Vadrot
Carolin Hirt and Alice Vadrot
  • University of Vienna, Political Science, Vienna, Austria (carolin.hirt@univie.ac.at)

The European Union’s Digital Twin of the Ocean (EU DTO) represents a novel initiative to integrate advanced digital technologies with ocean governance, aiming to model and predict marine ecosystems to support policy decisions and sustainable management. As a complex socio-technical infrastructure, the development of the EU DTO involves coordination across a vast geographic area, integrating diverse technologies, standards, and stakeholders with varying resources and interests. This paper therefore analyzes the EU DTO as a Socio-Technical Network (STN) comprising three core components: the physical oceanic entity, the digital technical artifact, and the intricate socio-technical relationships binding them. It pursues the following research questions: (1) What are the primary social actors and technical components comprising the EU DTO infrastructure? and (2) What Social-Social, Technical-Technical, and Socio-Technical relations define this infrastructure?. Using a mixed methods approach involving interview data, stakeholder surveys, and desk research, it empirically maps out the multi-layered socio-technical relationships within the DTO’s infrastructure. By modelling and analyzing the dynamic interplay between social actors and technical components, it identifies socio-technical barriers: firstly, technical barriers (e.g., lack of standardized data), secondly, social barriers (e.g., unequal resources), and thirdly, socio-technical barriers (e.g., unclear data transfer responsibilities). Combining this approach with a political ecology (PE) lens reveals the power dynamics and socio-environmental challenges of the EU DTO, including data accessibility disparities, and highlights how broader power relations, institutional interests, and political agendas shape its development and implementation.

How to cite: Hirt, C. and Vadrot, A.: Investigating and Modeling the Making of the EU Digital Twin of the Ocean, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-19807, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-19807, 2025.