GES4SEAS · Achieving Good Environmental Status for maintaining ecosystem SErvices, by ASsessing integrated impacts of cumulative pressures

GES4SEAS will inform and guide marine governance in minimizing human pressures and their impacts on marine biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, while maintaining the sustainable delivery of ecosystem services. This will be achieved through developing an innovative and flexible toolbox, tested, validated, demonstrated and upscaled, in the context of adaptive Ecosystem-Based Management (EBM). This will allow competent authorities to assess and predict the effect of multiple stressors (including climate change) and pressures from human activities, at the national, sub-regional, regional and European level. This will ensure they achieve Good Environmental Status (MSFD), and support different policies at national, European and global levels (e.g. BHD, Biodiversity Strategy, SDG). This will be achieved by integrating stakeholders and the key competent authorities in a Practitioner Advisory Board, in co-creating and validating the toolbox and the EBM approach. In this, we focus on real problem solving and following an iterative and incremental development approach. This will allow GES4SEAS to achieve Technological and Societal Readiness Levels 6, since our solutions will be tested and demonstrated at 11 Learning Sites (LSs) covering important regions and environments. These LSs have been selected to explore geographical specificities, in the four regional seas, with regards to the impacts of cumulative pressures (including climate change) on the functioning of ecosystems, and their capacity for providing ecosystem services, to ensure better management. This includes LSs to explore transboundary issues and a LS at pan-European scale, to explore comparability and harmonization across regional seas, and gain understanding on the functioning of transverse topics (e.g. invasive species, HABs and jellyfish blooms, and top predators). Finally, to internationalize outputs, we have included a LS in the Caribbean Sea, in relation to the SDGs framework and intense extreme events.