The EU Mission ‘Restore our Ocean and Waters’ (Mission Ocean or the Mission) aims to protect and restore the health of our ocean, seas and waters by 2030. The first phase (2021 to 2025) will focus on development and piloting of new R&I solutions to achieve these aims. In particular, new solutions will be developed for ecosystem restoration, pollution reduction, and developing circular and carbon-neutral blue economy activities. The solutions will be developed by multiple innovative and cross-cutting Horizon Europe-funded projects across four distinct Lighthouse sites at the Atlantic-Arctic, Mediterranean Sea, Baltic-North Sea, and Danube-Black Sea basins.
Currently, maritime policy and regulation are developed on a sector-by-sector basis, and the existing regulatory framework may pose some challenges to the deployment of the cross-cutting solutions developed by Mission Ocean projects. To help pave the way for success, PREP4BLUE (P4B) partners carried out a significant assessment of the enablers and barriers to the practical and large-scale roll-out of the technologies and solutions being developed in Phase 1 of the Mission. The assessment aimed to shed light on the landscape of policy, regulation and the associated challenged faced by innovators in the field. Based on the findings of this assessment, P4B partners have outlined a series of detailed recommendations and solutions or ‘Roadmap’, to support Mission projects with the piloting and scale-up of their solutions. The Roadmap is contained in P4B Deliverable 5.3.
To create the Roadmap, a top-down approach was used to compile 77 EU maritime policies and regulations which may impact the scaling of Misson Ocean solutions into a heatmap. This heatmap provides an overview of Mission Ocean relevant policies and shows how closely they are linked to the specific objectives of the Mission. It is a living document and will be updated as changes to policies and regulations occur.
In addition to the heatmap, 16 semi-structured interviews with innovators and researchers were conducted between June and October 2023 to gather their experiences in developing and deploying Mission-related innovations from the bottom-up. The interviews were supplemented by surveys sent out in collaboration with the PREP4BLUE partners. Workshops were held with Mission stakeholders to further elaborate the recommendations and solutions set out in the Roadmap. A focus group, attended by policy actors from all Mission Ocean & Waters Lighthouse Areas as well as representatives from the EU and marine innovators, facilitated an in-depth exploration and validation of the study’s findings and proposed recommendations.
The Roadmap can be accessed by clicking on the button below.