How is Offshore Wind Industry expansion transforming the UK North Sea?

The industrial expansion of offshore wind energy in the UK North Sea is rapid, unprecedented and ongoing. It contributes to a global trend in the intensification of marine activity and forms a cornerstone of Europe’s intended transformation to a sustainable blue economy. Increased research efforts are being made to understand the effects of this expansion on established social-ecological entities in the area, but these efforts have not been combined to form a whole-system perspective. In this thesis, the UK North Sea (UKNS) is perceived as a complex social-ecological system (SES), whose parts interact in dynamic and non-linear ways to produce emergent, system wide phenomena that affect the system’s overall functioning and integrity.
Focus groups and marine expert interviews reveal the perceived ways that offshore wind expansion affects this complex adaptive system. These are analysed to qualitatively and semi-quantitively map UKNS interactions. Qualitative results mapped using the social-ecological action situations (SE-AS) framework depict complex and variable responses to offshore wind development across the UKNS: coastal communities both seek out and actively conflict with offshore wind developments, whilst fisheries are variously unaffected or threatened, reduced and displaced from traditional fishing grounds by them. Fish species are negatively impacted by offshore wind developments, but these impacts can be outweighed where the same developments prevent local trawling activity. Fuzzy cognitive mapping is used to combine qualitative and semi-quantitative results, which have then been modelled to reveal emergent UKNS system properties that could result from offshore wind expansion, such as fisheries reductions, pressure onto marine protected areas and shipping routes, and reductions in current strength and water quality. Marginal benefits to coastal communities and increased port investment are also anticipated.
Application of this social-ecological perspective can complement marine spatial planning (MSP) in several capacities. It illuminates trade-offs between marine plan policies and objectives in statutory marine planning, and could complement MSP tools such as The Crown Estate’s resource identification and optimisation tool through incorporation of feedbacks, cumulative effects, social value, and expert perceptions. Furthermore, a SES-based understanding solidifies geographical critiques of ‘blue growth’ there are localised instances of ‘blue injustice’ for communities, fisheries and ecologies as a result offshore wind developments and addressing these will be important on the path to a sustainable blue economy.