Photo: Udo Wagner

Marine ecological-economic systems under global change: responsibility for regime shifts and sustainability

Project overview

marEEchange pursues the following overall scientific aims:

1. Explore how to attribute causal responsibility for a regime shift to actors (fishers, anglers, administration, fishery managers) and circumstances (in particular climate change).

2. Study reorganization after a regime shift in real time for the Western Baltic sea, and assess how the period of reorganization may open a window of opportunity for a change into a regime of sustainability.

3. Propose pathways into a sustainable future for the Western Baltic sea, and contribute to implementing in transdisiciplinary collaboration with key actors from the commercial and recreational fisheries, as well as from administration and the wider society.

marEEchange aims to study the Western Baltic sea as a ‘time machine’ into the future. The drastic changes that are expected for marine and coastal ecological-economic systems around the globe, driven by climate change and increasing anthropogenic pressures, have been experienced here earlier than elsewhere, due to the particular ecological and socio-economic situation.

marEEchange aims at a close, transdisciplinary collaboration with the stake- and knowledge holders who have been directly affected by the regime shift to understand (a) how they attribute responsibility to actors, and (b) what would constitute, from their points of view, a regime of sustainability. We hypothesize that demographic change, with an increasing number of fishers reaching retirement age, and change towards a more part-time commercial fishery, with a fuzzy distinction vis-a-vis the recreational fishery with multiple target species, an almost complete abandoning of industrial fishing, and increasing regionalization of fisheries-related value chains, can be critical elements in a transition towards a sustainable Western Baltic.

Granting agency: Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)

Project duration: 2023–2025

Work packages (WP)

WP 1: Engagement, Management & Outreach

WP 1 will address the problem how to attribute the responsibility for a regime shift to causes and actors in hindsight, i.e., after a tipping point has been crossed, as it is the case for the Western Baltic.

WP 2: Reorganization after a regime shift

A social-ecological-economic system will reorganize after having crossed a tipping point. The Western Baltic Sea provides a unique opportunity for scientific analysis of the reorganization process in real time. WP II aims at an understanding of the on-going reorganization process of the commercial and recreational fishery, as well as more generally in terms of attitudes, to provide the basis for an inter- and transdisciplinary analysis how to use the current crisis for transformation towards sustainability in WP 3.

WP 3: Sustainability pathways for marine ecological-economic systems

Given that a period of reorganization is also a window of opportunity for a transformation towards sustainability, WP 3 addresses the questions:

How should a sustainability for the Western Baltic Sea look like?
How to operationalize different actors’ responsibility for sustainability?
How could the system be transformed towards such a regime of sustainability?

WP 3 aims both at identifying sustainability pathways useful for the Western Baltic Sea and at insights generalizable to other marine ecological-economic systems.

WP 4: Engagement, management & outreach

WP 4 coordinates marEEchange’s transdisciplinary engagement with stake- and knowledge-holders outside academia, facilitates collaboration within the consortium and with international scientific partners, and is responsible for outreach activities and communication of key results towards the broader public. WP 4 is designed to foster the production and uptake of innovative and actionable science.

Further information about the earlier marEEshift project.