The UK is rapidly entering a phase where the majority of its energy comes from renewable resources. However, to maintain this push towards green energy providers will need to find more sites to generate power. In recent years there have been moves towards using offshore wind generation instead of onshore wind farms. Whilst offshore wind has many advantages there is potential impact on marine wildlife that needs to be considered. New applications for offshore windfarm sites require a thorough Environmental Impact Assessment and the offshore environment makes it hard to accurately assess current marine populations, making this a time-consuming and costly operation. In this research we propose to develop a real-time acoustic monitoring platform that will enable operators to assess a site for marine mammal activity at a fraction of the current cost and effort and moreover, produce better and more accurate results. This will be done by deploying large numbers of novel low cost, low power underwater wireless sensor devices (NanoPAMs) which detect the sounds that marine mammals make to navigate, hunt and communicate. The data from each NanoPAM is transmitted using acoustic signals over distances up to 10 km to a surface buoy. Since the animals may be able to hear these acoustic signals, the NanoPAMs transmit very low energy acoustic signals which blend into the background noise and are also smart enough to wait until animals have left the area before transmitting so as not to influence behaviour. The surface buoy then uses radio to send the received data back to shore where it can be visualised and analysed. On shore, the data collected can be turned into an understanding of the current activity of marine mammals and also to monitor the ongoing impact of offshore windfarm developments. In future, the system could be rapidly deployed in multiple locations to help select sites that would minimise the impact on our marine wildlife.

The current shift to marine renewable energies, with UK investment to top £150bn, will likely transform the sustainability (the balance between economic growth, social well-being, and environmental care) and resilience (adapting to change, adversity and new opportunities) of coastal communities and adjacent seas. History tells us that previous energy transitions have led to profound environmental and socio-cultural change for local communities due to their often boom-and-bust nature. Yet most analyses focus on technical and economic criteria and rarely address environmental, social, cultural, and institutional impacts or whether transitions are just (i.e., that they are as fair and inclusive as possible for everyone concerned). This oversight must be addressed to reduce carbon emissions in a way that also improves outcomes for coastal environments and communities. TRANSECTS will address this oversight using a novel transdisciplinary approach, co-developed with coastal resilience stakeholder partners and combining sociology, economics and geography with engineering, ecology, history, law, archaeology, and creative arts. We adopt a place- and time-based research design using learnings from the experiences of different coastal communities during past energy transitions. We combine natural and social sciences with arts and humanities to explore the shifts from non-renewable marine energy sources (whale oil in the 1800s through to offshore oil and gas in the later-1900s) to more sustainable renewable energy sources in the early-2000s. We will analyse differences across geographical scales (small areas to large regions), between mainland coastal and island communities and between different UK regions. The TRANSECTS project has three primary aims: 1) Use historical and current case studies to understand marine energy transitions and their impacts on the sustainability and resilience of coastal communities and adjacent seas 2) Integrate creative methods with community dialogue and scientific research/expertise to enable communities to explore their roles and responses to energy transitions 3) Establish a 'theory of change' for marine energy transitions which will assist coastal communities to improve social, economic and environmental sustainability and resilience, and transform decision-making To achieve these aims, we will explore three cases: the Humber Estuary, the Orkney Islands and east-coast Scotland. Each has changed their main marine energy economic activity from whale oil via offshore fossil fuels to marine renewable energies and has experienced changing economic fortunes, marginalisation and (often hidden) hardship caused by these transitions. TRANSECTS will examine the raw energy sources (whales, oil & gas deposits, offshore wind plus associated habitats and seabed): how much and where they have been located. It will consider the services provided by these resources. The project will assess how nearby communities have been affected during transitions by analysing - for example - migration, employment, and mental and physical health. TRANSECTS will combine empirical data with human stories (from archives and creative methods) to 're-people the past'. It will investigate the fairness and equity of decisions made during energy transitions ('just transition'). Importantly, it will work with communities to develop strategies to enable energy transitions that increase the resilience of coastal and marine ecosystems and the communities that depend on and interact with them.

The climate and ecological emergencies, Brexit and Covid-19 illustrate the enormity of change and disturbance currently impacting coastal communities in the UK, and the urgency of building resilience to accelerating, multi-faceted and new forms of risk. Our research aims to build the knowledge and know-how to enhance the resilience of marine resource-users to environmental, regulatory and socio-cultural change, while simultaneously improving their wellbeing and reducing adverse impacts on the marine environment. Marine investment, policy and management decisions are often understood as prioritisation decisions ("this or that"), but they can also involve system interactions and trade-offs, and so create winners and losers. Trade-off conflicts manifest in policy consultation, planning and licensing decisions, and in the everyday behaviours of resource-users choosing to support (or not) particular interventions. There is, therefore, increasing impetus to be explicit about trade-offs where they can explain the political acceptability, effectiveness and durability of marine plans, fisheries regulations, protected area designations or offshore wind farms. To date, research has focused on ecological trade-offs or social-ecological trade-offs related to tensions between environmental sustainability and human welfare and wellbeing, with little attention to resilience. Yet, emerging research shows trade-offs between resilience and wellbeing, and between resilience and sustainability with important implications for marine policy and practice. Our research will be the first to develop a nexus perspective on resilience, wellbeing and sustainability to acknowledge that any solution for one objective must equally consider the other two in the nexus. We apply the nexus perspective to on-the-ground and policy interventions to systematically evaluate synergies and trade-offs among resilience, wellbeing and sustainability across scales and sectors, and to identify opportunities to improve these outcomes together. We address the three call themes by: THEME 1: Investigating how diverse marine resource-users respond to varied disturbance events, how their resilience intersects with their wellbeing and engagement with sustainability, and what they VALUE as important for maintaining and improving nexus outcomes. THEME 2: Applying the nexus perspective to the policy context to understand how diverse values and nexus dynamics are traded off in decision-making currently. Working closely with policy and industry stakeholders we will develop a DECISION-SUPPORT FRAMEWORK to interrogate the acceptability of trade-off decisions within and across marine sectors. THEME 3: Applying the nexus perspective to on-the-ground INTERVENTIONS to assess how initiatives intend to improve resilience, wellbeing and/or sustainability, and currently deal with trade-offs across the nexus. Working closely with practitioners, we will identify opportunities to improve future iterations of these interventions so they can better deliver triple benefits across the nexus. Project deliverables include: a new nexus perspective; a low-tech trade-off decision-support framework for use by policy-makers and implementers, and; evidence that applying a nexus perspective can improve both policy and on-the-ground interventions in marine social-ecological systems in the UK across the domains of marine heritage, sustainable development of communities, and marine environmental regulation. This research will be world leading and of international importance. The resilience of people, communities and ecosystems underpins global action to sustainably manage aquatic ecosystems (SDG14), respond to climate change (SDG13), and deliver enduring improvements in wellbeing (SDG1+2). Our research addresses a significant gap in knowledge of how nexus dynamics play out across scales that will be fundamental to successful delivery of these Sustainable Development Goals.

The UK government currently faces an acute risk to energy security from de-carbonisation associated with the global climate emergency, recent energy price rises and the threat of hydrocarbon supplies due to the conflict in eastern Europe. In the light of these events, targets for electricity generation from renewable sources have been increased. Offshore Wind (OW) will make a significant contribution to meeting these targets, but the timeline necessitates a 25% increase in the pace of OW deployment. The UK Government believes this acceleration can be achieved by making environmental assessments at a more strategic level, implementing nature-based design standards and reducing red tape. Seabird impacts are the top consenting issue inhibiting OW expansion in the UK sector of the North Sea (especially black-legged kittiwake, common guillemot, razorbill and Atlantic puffin). Policy proposals for overcoming these issues include making environmental assessments at a more strategic level, adopting strategic compensation measures, and delivering net gain to seabird populations and the wider marine ecosystem that is robust to climate change. Our project addresses three key Research Questions (RQs) designed to deliver urgently needed advice to ensure that these policies are implemented in ways which simultaneously deliver both OW expansion and net gain for seabirds and the ecosystem: RQ1. What are the cumulative impacts of OW on seabirds and on the wider ecosystem, and how do these scale with capacity? RQ2. What scale and extent of compensatory measures are required to provide strategic headroom of net gain to seabirds and the whole ecosystem while avoiding unforeseen consequences? RQ3. How can we incorporate sufficient headroom in strategic compensation to ensure it remains robust to future projections of climate change? Our project will focus on the key North Sea OW-seabird interaction area off southeast Scotland, but all the methods will be transferable to other UK regions. To answer the Research Questions we will use a range of inter-related models of ecosystem, seabird, forage fish and zooplankton dynamics together with new supporting data. The models will be deployed in innovative new ways to address the policy-driven challenges and make the results accessible to stakeholders through online tools. The new data collection will involve novel use of autonomous underwater and remote controlled uncrewed surface vehicles (AUV and USV) working in concert and integrated with the digital aerial seabird surveys commissioned in support of existing environmental programmes by the OW industry and as part of the Crown Estate OWEC programme. The combined AUV and USV surveys will gather multi-frequency hydroacoustic data on forage fish (sandeel and sprat/herring) patchiness in control areas not yet developed for OW, and existing OW farms. The coincident aerial surveys will gather high resolution data on seabirds. These matched predator-prey data will provide crucial process-based understanding on predator-prey interactions needed to estimate cumulative impacts on seabirds (RQ1) and develop effective strategic compensation (RQ2). Data to support RQ3 on modelling of climate-proofing for strategic compensation measures will be assembled from UK AMM7 biogeochemical model projections of ocean physics and chemistry under the IPCC RCP8.5 emissions scenario. Developers and stakeholders will be engaged early in the project to design a suite of potential strategic compensation scenarios which will be incrementally tested as the project progresses. Policy briefs setting out the findings and advice-to-date will be produced at annual intervals to ensure that the new evidence and tools developed in the project are fed rapidly into the decision-making process.

The UK Marine Area extends over some 867,400 km2, an area equivalent to around 3.5 times the UK terrestrial extent. The UK's marine heritage is extraordinarily rich and exciting. Wrecks on the sea bed range in date from the Bronze Age to the World Wars and bear testimony to Britain as an island nation, a destination for trade and conquest, and in past times, the heart of a global empire. Communities along the coast have been shaped by their maritime heritage and monuments and stories recall losses and heroes. Much further back in time, before the Bronze Age, a great deal of what is now the North Sea was dry land, peopled by prehistoric communities who lived in lowland landscapes, some on very different coastlines. The British Isles would have been distant uplands above hills and plains and rivers. This arc of heritage, stretching over 23,000 years, is represented by an abundance of collections. Charts and maps, documents, images, film, oral histories, sonar surveys, seismic data, bathymetry, archaeological investigations, artefacts and objects, artworks and palaeoenvironmental cores all tell us different things about our marine legacy. But they can't easily be brought together. They are dispersed, held in archives, unconnected and inaccessible. This matters because it is clear that the story of our seas is of huge interest to the UK public. In 2019 alone, there were 2.9m visits to Royal Museums Greenwich, home of the National Maritime Museum; 1.1m visits to National Museum Royal Navy; 837,000 visits to Merseyside Maritime Museum, and 327,000 visits to HMS Belfast. It is also clear that our exploitation of our seas is increasing dramatically. Windfarms, mining, dredging for aggregates, port expansions, leisure and fishing are all placing tensions on the survival of our heritage. If we are to unlock new stories and manage our past effectively and sustainably, we need to join up all our marine collections and get the most of them. UNPATH will bring together first class universities, heritage agencies, museums, charitable trusts and marine experts to work out how to join these collections up. It will use Artificial Intelligence to devise new ways of searching across newly linked collections, simulations to help visualise the wrecks and landscapes, and science to help identify wrecks and find out more about the artefacts and objects from them. It will deliver integrated management tools to help protect our most significant heritage. And it will invite the public to help co-design new ways of interacting with the collections and to help enhance them from their own private collections. The methods, code and resources created will be published openly so they can used to shape the future of UK marine heritage.