The main aim of Marine SABRES is to restore marine biodiversity and ensure a sustainable blue economy by increasing the uptake of ecosystem-based management (EBM) in European marine areas. Making EBM more achievable and implementable requires us to comprehensively study and analyse marine social-ecological systems (SES), which is a very complex task. To address this complexity, Marine SABRES is co-developing with stakeholders a simple social-ecological systems analysis framework (the Simple SES) for understanding and assessing coastal and marine SES in three demonstration areas (DAs). The application of this Simple SES will also support the multi-actor co-development of pathways to transformation, which are a series of possible steps along a path towards each DA’s EBM goals.
To create pathways to transformation we must explore what society might look like in future, because the pathways need to be future-proof (EBM goals can be long-term endeavours) and the paths may need to adapt if society changes. For example, the pathway to positive ecosystem change will differ depending on whether society is focussed on sustainability or whether it prioritises intense resource use. Methods exist to capture visions of future economic, social and environmental changes within a set of scenarios (such as ‘shared socio-economic pathways’ (SSPs)). However, the challenge is that not everyone will see the world in the same way. Different viewpoints, or worldviews, will exist among key actors and stakeholders and these may not always align with the more generic envisioned future scenarios. Where DA stakeholders’ worldviews align with, or are more sustainability-minded than, higher-level ‘green’ futures, incremental improvement is all that is needed to reach EBM goals. Conversely, where conflicts exist between worldviews and the possible future scenarios, and where these worldviews are less ‘green’ than the future scenarios, this is the point at which transformation is most needed.
As co-creation and co-development is a fundamental element of Marine SABRES, potential divergence between the worldviews of DA stakeholders and the scenarios of possible future EU or global societies should be considered when developing the pathways to transformation. The first stage of this is to explore how generic worldviews compare to widely-adopted sets of future scenarios. Further stages examine the relationships between worldviews and future scenarios in the DAs themselves and how this shapes the transformation pathways. This report addresses the former; describing the comparison of future scenarios with generic worldviews. We do this by regionalising scenarios of global future scenarios (SSP-RCPs) to the European continental scale and by cross-comparing these scenarios to a set of recognised worldviews using a PESTLE framework, which describes the political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental
conditions in each future scenario.