Inquiry into the Potential of Stakeholder-Driven Sustainable Blue Economy Strategies to Bolster Resilience in Marine and Coastal Ecosystem Services

The Ocean, with its distinctive habitats and bountiful resources serves as a crucial asset for coastal communities. However, it faces mounting threats from various anthropogenic stressors, including pollution, eutrophication, overfishing, invasive species, biodiversity decline. Concurrently, national strategies are being implemented to boot the Blue Economy, which relies heavily on the proper functioning of marine ecosystem services which depend on the good environmental status of marine biodiversity. This underscores the pressing need to prioritize actions aimed at nurturing healthy, resilient, and productive marine ecosystems. In response to these challenges, the BRIDGE-BS project engaged local stakeholders at the science-policy-society interface, including public and private representatives of blue economy sectors, academia and NGOs, from the coastal Black Sea regions in a collaborative effort to develop transformative pathways for fostering a sustainable blue economy. Employing a goal-oriented, interactive system-wide approach, the project facilitated the co-production of knowledge and co-design of interventions geared towards catalyzing transformative change within unsustainable maritime systems (i.e. fishery, coastal tourism, shipping and ports). The objective was to support the well-being of local communities socially and economically, while ensuring a good environmental status of marine ecosystems. The outcome is a comprehensive portfolio of short, mid, and long term actions intended to achieve sustainable objectives formulated through a future vision collaboratively developed with local stakeholders. Those actions range from ambitious environmental management measures to innovative solutions, including technological, social and institutional innovations. Furthermore, this research endeavors to evaluate the stakeholder-driven approach's efficacy in delivering sustainable outcomes by assessing its capacity to support the resilience of key ocean ecosystem services and mitigate the tendency to prioritize economic development over environmental conservation. To accomplish this, a qualitative framework was devised to address fundamental inquiries such as: the specific components of the system affected by proposed actions and their impacts on ecosystems; the ecosystem services (ES) to which these actions pertain and whether priority ES (i.e. provisioning of food, delivery of cultural recreational services; regulating and maintaining habitats functioning), deemed less resilient, are targeted; the identification of potentially lost or overlooked ES, and elucidation of any latent ecosystem services. Through such analysis, this research aims to explore the potential of stakeholder engagement co-production processes in nurturing resilient marine and coastal ecosystems while safeguarding against the undue prioritization of economic interests over environmental sustainability.