Downscaling Climate and Ocean Change to Services: Thresholds and Opportunities (CE2COAST)

Human-made global change will have significant impacts at regional and coastal scales on marine systems, dependent socioeconomies and ocean services. These can strongly interact with regional and local human-activity induced pressures such as fishing, pollution, and eutrophication. The challenges of understanding climate and ocean change at European and global scales require expertise exceeding that available from one single nation. CE2COAST adds transnational value by strategically combining national expertise across the disciplines of oceanography, marine biogeochemistry, marine ecology, data and database management, earth system, marine and ecosystem modelling and science and policy communication.

CE2COAST delivers an observation-driven synthesis of statistical and dynamical downscaling methodology and provides benchmarked single and ensemble Earth System Model simulations that are downscaled to study regional and coastal ocean domains. To inform adaptation policies to oceanic and coastal change, CE2COAST delivers key knowledge to end-users through a range of dissemination activities. Stakeholder clusters enable participation in decision making throughout the project and facilitate co-production of science products tailored to specific scientific, management, regulatory, industrial and ecosystem service assessments.

The project objective are:

• Generate and analyse customised regional observational datasets to deliver empirical understanding of the state, variability and trends of ocean and coastal service pressures;
• Deliver downscaled simulations of oceanic response to climate change at basin to regional/coastal scales;
• Investigate the added value of improved downscaled projections for determining future pressure (stressor) changes relevant for key ocean services;
• Co-produce research strategies with stakeholders and communicate new project knowledge to relevant management, regulatory, industrial and societal organisations;
• Enhance the European Marine Research dimension.