Natasa Vaidianu & Madalina Ristea. Ocean & Coastal Management

In the past few decades, unsustainable activities and increasing demands on marine resources have compromised the future use of the marine environment. Within this context, Romania has initiated efforts to incorporate a Maritime Spatial Planning Directive into the national legislative framework; and, in 2017, established a competent authority to undertake its implementation, so that marine spatial plans can be enacted by 31 March 2021. The authors reviewed Romania’s legal regime on MSP and developed a first approach for a MSP framework in Romania. The paper identified key challenges and concerns that are anticipated from the incorporation of MSP into the national spatial planning framework in its current form: a) Romanian stakeholders have a relatively poor understanding of European, national and regional sea planning regulations, b) concerns related to MSP implementation at regulatory level, c) huge need for sharing of MSP-relevant information for coherent planning, d) challenges of assessing the needs of interconnected ecosystems (including relevant EU and international legislation). Public engagement in marine spatial planning design is not commonplace. The study considered very specific aspects of how the marine spatial planning process evolves and will contribute to providing a coherent approach to reduce conflicts in the Romanian marine environment, appropriate MSP implementation, as well as minimizing the pressures and impacts on the marine resources.

IMBeR is a multidisciplinary global environmental change research initiative sponsored by the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) and Future Earth.

It began in 2005 and has advanced understanding about potential marine environmental effects of global change, and the impacts and linkages to human systems at multiple scales. It is apparent that the complex environmental issues and associated societal/sustainability choices operate at and across the interfaces of natural and social sciences and the humanities, and require both basic, curiosity-driven research and problem-driven, policy-relevant research. This underpins IMBeR's vision: “Ocean sustainability under global change for the benefit of society”.

The IMBeR International Project Office (IPO) provides management support for the planning and implementation of IMBeR activities, coordination between the international network of IMBeR scientists, and collaboration with related international projects and programmes. 

The IPO is currently hosted at the Institute of Marine Research in Bergen, Norway until the end of March 2020. IMBeR is soliciting offers for a new host arrangement from April 2020 onwards, for a period of at least three, and preferably five years.

Alistair Hobday, Claire M. Spillman, J. Paige Eveson, Jason R. Hartog, Xuebin Zhang and Stephanie Brodie. Frontiers in Marine Science April 2018, 5(137): 1-9

A changing climate, in particular a warming ocean, will very likely impact marine industries. For example, aquaculture businesses may not be able to maintain production in their current location into the future, or area-restricted fisheries may need to follow the fish as their distribution shifts. Preparation for these potential climate impacts can be improved with information about the future.. The authors suggest risk management in a globally changing environment can be improved by combining seasonal forecasting to manage short-term variability, while using climate scale projections to plan transformative change, such as when to relocate a seafood business. Use of seasonal forecasts can reduce the costs and increase the profits at a location, thus extending the time that the business can operate.

A new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change finds that if atmospheric CO2 continues to increase, the differences in extremes in surface-ocean acidity between summer and winter will roughly double by the end of the century. The amplified seasonality in acidity is projected to occur in all ocean regions. In the tropics and subtropics, associated impacts on organisms are likely to worsen during summer when acidity is highest and improve during winter when acidity is lowest; in colder ocean regions, these summer-winter tendencies are reversed. Future projections of these seasonal extremes come from nine Earth System Models that participated in the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report. Projections were made not only for acidity (hydrogen ion concentration) but also for a saturation index that indicates how suitable conditions are for calcification, a process by which corals and shell builders produce hard skeletal material. The seasonal amplitude of that index (the aragonite saturation state) was found to generally decline as atmospheric CO2 increases. With time this could affect the ability of shell forming organisms to grow, with summer seawater conditions becoming less suitable for growth over most of the ocean.
Article: Kwiatkowski, L., & Orr, J. C. (2018). Diverging seasonal extremes for ocean acidification during the twenty-first century. Nature Climate Change, 8(2), 141-145. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-017-0054-0

IMBeR will hold its 8^th China-Japan-Korea (CJK) Symposium at the East China Normal University in Shanghai, China from 17-19 September 2018.
The theme of this regional IMBeR symposium is Marine Biogeochemical Sciences for the Sustainability of the West Pacific Biosphere.
The focus will be on analyzing the impact of climate change and anthropogenic forcing on physical processes and biogeochemical cycles, ecosystem structure and functions, and fisheries in the West Pacific region, and how these combined complex interactions, in turn, influence marine ecosystems and human society.

The session themes are:
* Advances in observation and modelling of physical and biogeochemical processes in the West Pacific region
* The response of marine ecosystems to natural and anthropogenic forcing: past, present and future
* Responses of society to global change in marine systems: ways forward (this session will be expanded upon in a training course on the 3^rd day)

The number of participants will be limited to 100, so you are encouraged to register soon and submit an abstrac, at: http://mform.imr.no/view.php?id=78294

Deadline for applications is 15 June 2018.

More information on the CJK symposium is available at:
http://imber.info/en/events/china-japan-korea-imber-symposia/cjk8

IMBeR is pleased to announce its endorsement of the Marine Ecosystem Modelling and Forecasting System in the China Seas and Northwestern Pacific (MEMFiS) project.

China´s coastal regions are under increasing pressure from both climate change and intensive human activity. The ecology of the coastal regions are particularly threatened by eutrophication, red tides and hypoxia events, etc. This raises the question of whether, and to what extent, ecological changes in coastal regions can be predicted, in order to preserve and retain their function and economic value.

Focusing on the ecology of the Bohai, Yellow, East and South China Seas, and the Northwestern Pacific, the MEMFis project aims to develop an integrated modelling and forecasting framework, using high-resolution physical-ecosystem models and data from multiple sources. By investigating ecosystem variability at different temporal and spatial scales, several key scientific questions will be tackled. Marine ecosystem variability will be addressed at the interface of different systems, parameterizations optimized for biogeochemical processes in different regions, data assimilation and ecosystem forecasting using multiple observations not only from moorings, buoys and ships, but also from bio-Argo, gliders and high-resolution satellite imagery.

More than 15 research institutes are involved in MEMFiS including the Second Institute of Oceanography, Tianjin University, the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, and the National Marine Environmental Forecasting Center.