FISHOREMAN FISHeries and Offshore Renewable Energies MANagement: towards an improvement in the representation of fisheries in the ecosystem approach using social, economic and cultural basis

The evaluation of cumulative impacts of offshore wind farms (OWF) is progressively becoming mandatory for the deployment of new projects. The quantification of these impacts is currently relying on numeric tools and mathematical models mainly based on schematic representation of fisheries dynamics, which tends to reduce the confidence given on their outputs. The improvement of the fisheries representation in ecosystem models can be resolved by gathering more cultural and socio-economic knowledge on these compartments and involving stakeholders during the development of tools and scenarios. The socio-ecological and cultural information can help to understand and quantify the main process driving fishers’ activities, outside of the classical economic maximization hypothesis, while involving stakeholders can facilitate the dialogue and exchange of information between scientists, fishers, and industry, thus promoting a higher trust on the capacities of such tools. In this context, FISHOREMAN aims to improve the representation of fisheries in the ecosystem approach applied to OWF. This project combines i) socio-economic analyzes of fisheries with a focus on three particular fishing fleets in the Eastern English Channel and three in the Mediterranean Sea, ii) a study of the spatio-temporal vulnerability of these fleets to the installation of OWF and their potential cohabitation, iii) the development of flexible new fishing fleet dynamic models able to better represent fishers in a OWF context that can be integrated into existing ecosystem models, and iv) the projections of the cumulative impacts of OWF using the new fishing fleet dynamic coupled to existing ecosystem models.