The Cooperative Participatory Evaluation of Renewable Technologies on Ecosystem Services (CORPORATES): Scottish Marine and Freshwater Science Vol 7 No 1

1 Introduction

1.1 Project Context

The 2012 World Business Council for Sustainable Development report 'Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services-scaling up business solutions' (World Business Council for Sustainable Development 2012) highlights the inherent linkages between businesses and ecosystems. The report emphasises the need to raise awareness and educate companies about the concept of ecosystem services ( ES); to partner with local stakeholders, environmental experts and government regulators; and, crucially, to collaboratively identify, measure, map and manage ecosystem impacts and seek to cooperatively improve services provided by biodiversity. In the UK, the legislative framework for marine licensing decisions ( UK Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009, Marine (Scotland) Act 2010) requires the concept of sustainable development and its relationship with ES. Additionally, there is now a legal requirement for stakeholder engagement and public participation such that the decisions to pursue developments in particular locations and submit licensing applications requires stakeholders to have contributed to the decision-making process and for outcomes of consultations to become part of the decision making process (Anon a and b 2013).

The CORPORATES project was instigated to introduce ES concepts into marine spatial planning ( MSP) decision-making by bringing together ecological, economic, socio-cultural and legislative experts with marine renewable energy ( MRE) industry and regulatory/advisory partners to exchange knowledge with a range of stakeholders from the fishing industry, NGOs, environmental consultancies and recreational groups as well as local government. There is a clear demand for a framework that balances ease of application with the ability to deal with complex social-economic-ecological issues, and a decision-support system that incorporates stakeholder values and establishes the links between these values and measurable ecological changes. Enabling effective deliberations on ecological trade-offs and making socially robust decisions in the face of uncertainty can enhance business, policy and legislative implementation ( UK NEA, 2014). As understanding of how the ecological trade-offs will affect economic, social and cultural values increases, better joint understanding by industry and stakeholders of what will change with (and without) the proposed development can reduce the risk of conflicts and resistance to the growth of MRE (Kenter et al. 2014). Within this project, and in collaboration with a wide range of expert stakeholders, we have developed and tested a decision-support system incorporating participatory mapping of benefits to a range of stakeholder groups from the use of marine ES and building a shared conceptual model of the social-ecological system, using the Firth of Forth, Scotland, as a case study.

1.2 Background

Expansion of the offshore wind sector is an important policy area across the UK and is attracting substantial inward investment. The UK is legally committed under the EU Renewable Energy Directive (2009/28/ EC) to meeting 15% of its total energy demand from renewable sources by 2020. Within Scotland, the Scottish Government has set a target of 30% by 2020, with renewable sources satisfying 100% of domestic electricity demand (Scottish Government. 2011). However, the use of large areas (100s of km ²) of the marine environment for renewable development may change biodiversity- ES relationships that society and business currently access from coastal and marine systems. While there are a number of useful and spatially explicit optimisation and planning software tools ( e.g. Marxan: www.uq.edu.au/marxan, MaRS: www.thecrownestate.co.uk ^[2] ) available what is considered to be the 'optimal' outcome or solution also depends on the values and priorities of the local user groups affected. Marine areas such as the Firth of Forth are important to a large range of stakeholders who pursue different activities and may be differently impacted by new developments such as windfarms and designated Marine Protected Areas. To achieve socially robust decisions, we argue that it is necessary to have a transparent decision-making process and for stakeholders to arrive at a shared understanding of the links between ecological processes, human activities, and benefits derived from ES.

Wong et al. (2014) have identified an integrated decision-support system as being urgently needed for the assessment of stakeholder perceptions and valuation of ES trade-offs brought about by ecological changes that large-scale offshore developments will produce. One of the novelties of the CORPORATES project was the ability to focus this pilot study on a real-life example of how ES could potentially change, working with highly motivated stakeholders at the point in time when large-scale windfarm developments are being designed. The case study is the Firth of Forth, Scotland, which is also an area that has the potential for the co-location of windfarms with a newly designated Marine Protected Areas ( MPA) in 2014.

Figure 2: Windfarm complex of 4 developments totalling 335 turbines: Seagreen, (collaboration of Scottish & Southern Electricity & Fluor), Inch Cape Offshore Limited (Repsol), and Neart na Gaoithe (Mainstream Renewable Power). Including the Firth of Forth Banks Complex, now a designated Marine Protected Area ( MPA).

The Firth of Forth is a site of national economic, ecological and societal importance (Figure 2). Four offshore windfarms - Inch Cape Offshore Limited, Neart Na Gaoithe, Seagreen Alpha and Seagreen Bravo - have recently been consented in the Forth and Tay area. The Neart na Gaoithe windfarm east of the Fife Ness coastline will have up to 75 turbines, generating 450 megawatts ( MW) of power. The Alpha and Bravo Seagreen developments combined will consist of up to 150 turbines, around 27-38km off the Angus coastline, and could generate 1050 MW. The Inch Cape development, also off the Angus coastline, will total no more than 110 turbines, with a total capacity of 784 MW. The developments in the Forth and Tay region could provide 2.284 GW of power and will involve a total of up to 335 turbines. If these projects go to completion, this amount of renewable energy production would be a considerable milestone in advancing the UK's low carbon economy. Yet the Forth supports a range of other uses, including merchant shipping, defence, fishing as well as tourism and recreation. The site is also of major ecological significance, being the location of designated ( EU Birds Directive) Special Protection Areas on the Forth Islands, and three areas off shore (see hatched areas in Figure 2) have recently been designated as a series of MPAs. This plurality of uses raises the potential for considerable conflict between users. Although there is a robust consultation system in existence with the use of environmental impact assessments ( EIA) procedures for all large offshore developments, the current potential for large proportions of our seas to rapidly have demands for multiple uses provides an urgent need for the identification of the scale and spatial extent of ecological, economic and cultural ES provided by marine biodiversity. The current EIA system is a more linear approach which struggles to evaluate the ecosystem level effects of human induced changes and an evaluation of their significance to different stakeholders to allow appreciation of ecological trade-offs to be made in a more explicit and transparent way. To achieve this, the project built on recent conceptualisations of marine ES (Turner et al. 2014), cultural services (Church et al. 2014), and shared values and deliberation (Kenter et al. 2014) that were developed as part of the UK National Ecosystem Assessment Follow-On phase ( UK NEA, 2014).

The project also linked to current research conducted by the University of Aberdeen and Marine Scotland Science that is exploring the functional relationships between the spatially explicit changes to primary production up through the trophic chain driven by the changes in hydrodynamic processes that large scale, potentially gravity-based wind turbines will generate. Predicting the change in these bio-physical dynamics is thus crucial for understanding how windfarm design configurations and size of foundation may affect provisional, regulating and cultural ES.

An important part of the project was taking a social-ecological systems approach to characterise the relationship between ecosystems, their services and benefits, and drivers of change. Systems are a way of describing interrelated sets of elements or entities (Van Gigch 1991). Complex systems, such as social-ecological systems, are characterised by emergent behaviour, i.e. complex behaviour, properties and patterns that arise from the relatively simple elements of the system through positive and negative causal feedback loops (Kay & Regier 2000; Richardson 2005). A key method used in the project was participatory conceptual systems modeling ( CSM), where system models are developed by groups of stakeholders or the public.

Participatory CSM has been used in a wide array of contexts, as summarised by Kenter et al. (2014). Examples include endangered wildlife management (Beall & Zeoli 2008), climate change adaptation (Bizikova, Dickinson & Pintér 2009), watershed management (Brown Gaddis, Vladich & Voinov 2007; Videira, Antunes & Santos 2009), water resource planning (Cockerill et al. 2006; Kallis et al. 2006), land use planning (Prell et al. 2007; Jones et al. 2009), sustainable forest management (Standa-Gunda et al. 2003; Mendoza & Prabhu 2006), tourism management (Patterson et al. 2004), balancing conservation and development goals (Sandker et al. 2010), coastal realignment (Kenter et al. 2013, 2014, Under review) and public sector administration (van den Belt et al. 2010). However the technique has not been applied to marine renewables or knowledge exchange around marine biodiversity and ES. This project also included a strong legal and policy context in the development of the participatory CSM technique. In practice, participants consider a system by discussing variables that can either increase or decrease (such as species diversity) and establishing how they interrelate through causal links.

Motivations for this kind of approach include a desire to pay attention to process as well as to content issues, a realisation that identification and description of problems is based on subjective judgement and a desire to negotiate a joint understanding and arrive at an 'inter-subjective' description (Lane & Oliva, 1998). When such agreement is attained, it should engender a desire to act to make improvements and to be committed to such actions (Ackoff, 1977; Eden & Sims, 1979; Lane & Oliva, 1998). Thus, participatory CSM exercises can be thought of as a process of learning, but also trust-building and exchange of values and beliefs through structured collaborative analysis.

1.3 Central aim

The aim of the project was to develop a process for exchange of ecological, legal, social, economic and cultural knowledge around marine Ecosystem Services ( ES), involving researchers and a wide range of public and private sector stakeholders that could serve as a decision-support tool for MSP.

1.4 Key objectives

1. Engage with commercial, government and community stakeholders to identify locally important benefits that ecosystem services ( ES) provide, considering multiple domains of evidence and value (ecological, economic, social, cultural).

2. Identify and map key elements of spatially explicit marine biodiversity in the wider Firth of Forth and Tay offshore region that stakeholders agree contribute to spatially identifiable provisioning, regulating and cultural ES.

3. Explore the stakeholder evaluation of the impacts to ES of different scenarios of change through windfarm development, introduction of Marine Protected Areas ( MPA) and climate change (including their combined impacts).

4. Evaluate the changes in hydrodynamic processes that the introduction of large scale windfarms may have on local primary production and the indication of possible links to changes in higher trophic levels and hence and consequent changes on ES.

5. Identify and exchange knowledge in relation to the legal framework and key policy drivers for decision-making in the study area.

6. Evaluate the knowledge exchange process as a decision-support tool to improve stakeholder engagement and uptake of ES knowledge in MSP decisions, particularly in relation to planning MRE.

1.5 Outline of the process

Objectives 1 through 3 were accomplished through two paired workshops. Objective 4 was accomplished as a stand-alone research project by members of the team and is currently being reviewed for publication in a peer-review journal. Objective 5 was conducted by members of the team and is presented in summary form in the section: Background on Identification and linkages of Law. A paper to be submitted to a peer-review journal is in production.

Objective 6 was partly accomplished from the formal evaluations of the workshops in sections Evaluation of Workshop 1 and Evaluation of Workshop 2 and will be completed with the evaluation from the stakeholders of the comments on the contents of this report. Two pre-workshop meetings were also held, one with the MRE Industry developers and the second with the fishing sector interest groups to provide informal information exchange about the aim and objectives of the project and to discuss concerns about the possible effects, if any, of the project on the current consenting process. The offshore windfarm projects were given consent by Scottish Government by 10 ^th Oct 2014. http://news.scotland.gov.uk/News/Consent-for-offshore-wind-development-1139.aspx

The first workshop took place on the 14th of November 2014 at the Scottish Government Building, Victoria Quay in Edinburgh, Scotland and was attended by stakeholders from Renewable Energy Developers, Fishing, Ecological and Recreational/Tourism sectors. The main objectives of the first workshop were to develop a common understanding between the range of stakeholders and to allow a sharing of their experiences and knowledge of the Firth of Forth region. The first workshop focused on three aspects: (1) Participatory Mapping, (2) Benefits, and (3) Interactions and Impacts. The second workshop took place on the 6th of March 2015 also at the Scottish Government Buildings, Victoria Quay in Edinburgh, Scotland. The same local stakeholders and representatives from the MRE industry and regulatory/advisory partners were invited to attend the second workshop. The main objective of the second workshop was to provide a process to exchange knowledge and enhance understanding around the links between benefits and final and intermediate ES. The second workshop consisted of four aspects: (1) Linking Local Benefits to ES, (2) Conceptual System Model ( CSM) Building, (3) Exploring Trade-Offs and Policy Options and (4) Decision-making Process.

The remainder of this report provides detail of the workshops, the actions, outcomes and evaluations as well as the processes that took place to design the two workshops and final conclusions on what elements a decision-support system for the MSP should include and why.

1.6 Research Team

The research team headed by the University of Aberdeen included the Scottish Association for Marine Science ( SAMS) and the James Hutton Institute ( JHI) and a partnership with Marine Scotland Science ( MSS); Marine Scotland is the Scottish Government directorate responsible for marine planning and licensing of devolved marine activities in Scotland, including marine renewables. This group together represented a strong multi-disciplinary team of researchers, with international reputations in their respective fields of ecology, human geography, marine renewable policy, marine ecosystems, law, oceanography, ecological economics, environmental psychology and anthropology.

1.7 Stakeholders

Stakeholders were identified as groups that had a vested interest in the Firth of Forth area inclusive of financial/livelihood, governance/management and personal reasons. The list was compiled on the basis of a combination of names provided by public and private sector partners, a previous stakeholder analysis for a recent ES valuation project in the Forth (Kenter, 2013), individual contacts of the research team, and internet searches and phone inquiries to try and increase the number of stakeholders in areas that tend to be underrepresented; particularly different types of recreation and tourism stakeholders. The list was also cross referenced with the licence application consultation process to ensure we had representatives of both statutory and non-statutory consultees for offshore renewable developments. Most stakeholders, with the exception of some of the recreational groups, were well accustomed to the Environmental Impact Assessment process for this region.

For the type of interactions that were to take place in the workshops, we limited the number of participants to between 25 and 30. Stakeholders were drawn from the following sectors: Renewables, Fishing, Ecological and Recreational/Tourism. Several additional stakeholders were invited due to their direct relevance to the case study. Table 1 details the organisations from whom a representative was present at either one or both the workshops.

Table 1 -Stakeholders who attended either one or both of the CORPORATES workshops.

Renewables ( MRE)	Fishing
SeaGreen Mainstream Inch Cape Offshore Limited	Scottish Fishermens Federation ( SFF) East Coast Inshore Fisheries Group Salmon Fishery Boards (Tay District)
Conservation	Recreational/Tourism
British Trust for Ornithology Marine Conservation Society RSPB Whale and Dolphin Conservation JNCC SNH Isle of May Bird Observatory Hartley Anderson Enviro Centre	Isle of May Boat Trips Royal Yachting Association Port Edgar Watersports Lothian Sea Kayak Club SFSA Marine Quest
Additional Relevant Stakeholders
Marine Scotland The Crown Estate Forth Estuary Forum Local Council South East Scotland