Developed with JPI Oceans members and co-created with stakeholders, the Strategy Framework 2021-2025 provides a coherent and impactful pan-European research and innovation setting, in support of healthy and productive seas and oceans.
The 12 thematic areas of the Strategy Framework are arranged in a continuous framing of ocean requirements with three interconnected priority areas for a resilient ocean: Ocean Health, Ocean Productivity, and Ocean Stewardship and Governance, and the three development ambitions committing to sustainability, blue economy and responsibility.
This setting reflects openness towards systemic approaches to ocean challenges, such as looking at cumulative effects of pollutants, at multiple impacts of climate change, or at observation and technology developments for environmental improvements.
A healthy ocean will provide a rich basis for sustained economic activities and people’s wellbeing. People’s drivers to protect ocean health thus range from economic interest to ethical responsibility. Sustainable development across all socioeconomic sectors is promoted as the United Nations 2030 Agenda. It explicitly includes the marine realm and offers guidance to address ocean health in connection with other Sustainable Development Goals. At the individual or sectoral level, Responsible Research and Innovation has emerged as an approach that appeals to all stakeholders of Research and Innovation to take responsibility for ensuring solutions that are societally inclusive and ecologically sustainable.
Ocean productivity is the aggregate of the ecosystem goods and services that the ocean provides for the wellbeing of people and socio-economies. Productive seas and oceans deliver the capital that sustains the ocean economy. To ensure humanity can continuously and increasingly benefit from marine resources, a knowledge-based approach that integrates ambition for ecological sustainability with blue economic development is pivotal.
To ensure both ocean health and productivity while economically benefitting from their services, requires responsible management of human interaction with the ocean, seas and coasts. This includes various forms of ocean stewardship and good governance and requires fit-for-purpose tools (including methodologies and approaches) that are based on the best available science and technology. Key tools for successful ocean stewardship and governance include a broad range of different elements such as technology development and digitalisation; observation, monitoring and modelling; coastal and maritime planning; and ocean literacy and capacity building. Advancing capacities in all these areas requires the mobilisation and transfer of expertise from multiple disciplines and sectors.
Joint Programming Initiatives were established to further align the European Research Area by enabling multinational funding opportunities, better coordination, increasing cost-efficiency and synergies, and reducing fragmentation in European research policy. Operating in the vast marine environment is challenging and costly. The distinctive role of JPI Oceans is to strategically prioritise and fund transnational research and innovation to increase the efficiency and impact for sustainably healthy and productive seas and oceans.