The proposal for additional activities for the European Partnership for a climate neutral, sustainable and productive Blue Economy Partnership (SBEP) responds to the Horizon Europe (HE) call HORIZON-CL6-2024-GOVERNANCE-01-1. Building on the work for enhancing the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA, updated version publication foreseen in spring 2024), 74 partners (+14 compared to the existing GA) from 29 (+4 compared to the existing GA) countries among Member States (MS), Associated Countries (AC) and Third Countries (TC), with the support of the EC will continue implementing the R&I programme together with comprehensive management activities to support the transformation of the blue economy, enhancing impact and building capacities as well as further structuring the ERA. In continuation with the existing Grant Agreement (GA), in its 2nd cycle, corresponding to the second instalment of the HE Work Programme, the Partnership will contribute to the Expected Outcomes of the topic HORIZON-CL6-2024-GOVERNANCE-01-02 by implementing two joint co-funded calls (in cash) together with a set of additional activities demonstrating European added valued to be carried out by deploying other type of assets. These entail: alignment of national thematic annual programming, alignment of monitoring programmes and sharing of research infrastructures through an open call for transnational access. As far as regards coordination and management activities, beside enhancing some existing tasks towards an increased impact, three new key tasks are foreseen on developing: (i) the Implementation Plan, (ii) thematic/regional portfolios (i.e. clusters) of projects supported through different HE calls as well as different programmes, (iii) future additional activities, e.g. on a European Ocean Observing System Knowledge Hub or an Early career PhDs network. In terms of priority areas, the new one on 'resilient coastal communities and businesses' adds to the four existing ones.

Pacific Ocean Pathways in support of sustainable development (PACPATH) aims at establishing cost-effective, efficient and sustainable transdisciplinary processes, methods and networks allowing stakeholders as scientists, public officers and citizens of the Pacific Islands to share common objectives and actions in order to achieve environmental sustainability considering SDG14, and its interlinkage to all other 16 SDGs, particularly SDG 13 and SDG 15. Stakeholders rely on sound science, targeted expertise, and reliable data-based information for risked-informed decision making, which however needs to be better targeted and co-constructed with local communities and knowledge-holders. In-line with major objectives of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, PACPATH will foster the development of participative and transformative process to build a Pacific stakeholder network drawing on two pilot sites, Fiji and New Caledonia, examining the impacts of climate change and other stressors on the ocean environment and ecosystem services, and their consequences for society, economy, and attainment of the SDGs while considering different aspects and their interactions for the physical, social-ecological and socio-economic ocean for a coconstructed sustainable ocean stewardship.

Coral reefs are the economically most highly valued ecosystems in the world. However, ongoing anthropogenic environmental changes have severely degraded their environments. Analyses of fossil data show that reefs living in so-called turbid habitats, characterized by the influence of terrestrial run-off, played an important role in the origins and maintenance of reef ecosystems. Key questions addressed in 4D-REEF are: 1) What did pristine reefs look like?; 2) Can we predict which areas will most likely support coral reefs in future climate change scenarios?; 3) Is it possible to develop monitoring tools that can be used to compare current and past conditions? We will study examples from the Holocene, prior to significant anthropogenic impact, and the Pliocene, a future greenhouse analogue, and compare them with the present-day reef conditions. These new data will provide the essential baselines for predicting the impact of ongoing global environmental change. 4D-REEF will develop new techniques for data collection, analysis, and visualisation that can be applied in future data-intensive projects in the Earth and Life Sciences. The increasingly complex, large size and 3D nature of datasets calls for the application of innovative techniques to be developed and standardised through cross-sectoral collaborations between Earth and Life scientists and visualisation experts. 4D-REEF will bring together leading groups and experts from a range of research environments, including universities, natural history museums, an applied science institute, SME, and NGO. This will generate a training environment in which the ESRs can make informed decisions to pursue high-level careers in or outside academia, and modify their training programme accordingly. Because of our interdisciplinary approach, the current need to understand biotic response to on-going environmental change, we believe that this is an ideal topic for the training of a cohort of Early Stage Researchers.

The United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goal 14 – Life below water – aims at conserving and sustainably using the oceans, which represent 70% of the Earth’s surface. This goal is connected to the global target to expand protected areas to 30% of the planet by 2030, focusing on areas that are particularly important for biodiversity, such as coral reefs, on which people living in coastal areas depend to survive. This is particularly the case for New Caledonia and Fiji – two archipelagos that are located in the Pacific Ocean – where most of the population lives in coastal areas and relies on some of the largest barrier reefs in the world. Pacific Island countries and territories – in particular their Indigenous peoples who see themselves as the custodians of the ocean for the general good, their sovereign rights, and their holistic knowledge – are increasingly recognized as integral for achieving such ambitious conservation objectives. The reef passages connecting coastal waters and the open ocean are known as outstanding hotspots of biodiversity and productivity. Hence, they are of multifaceted significance for the overall health of coral reef ecosystems. SOCPacific2R explores these social-ecological ‘keystone places’ and ‘communication zones’ that have hardly been investigated by natural and social sciences. Through its empirical focus on New Caledonia and Fiji, and based on a trusted and interdisciplinary French-German-Pacific partnership, the project aims at: 1. Conducting a transdisciplinary study of reef passages as under-researched features of social-ecological coral reef systems that constitute complex, interconnected, and dynamic assemblages of living and non-living, dwelling and transiting, entities that interact with each other; 2. Documenting both area-based and other management and conservation arrangements applied to reef passages, including pros and cons that local stakeholder groups identify; 3. Establishing a participatory science-society-policy dialogue informed by social-ecological studies, Oceanian socio-cosmologies and sovereignties, and governance norms in/for the management and conservation of reef passages. Through these interrelated objectives and associated capacity-building components, SOCPacific2R will both embrace and feed the vision of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030) and will facilitate the integration of reef passages in future marine/ocean policy and practice. It will provide holders of customary rights, policy-makers and other stakeholders with evidence-based research and exchange fora to empower them for the joint management and conservation of reef passages. Therefore, this project will integrate both a conventional and a more-than-human approach to ethnography into interdisciplinary dialogues, while using methods and dialogic spaces to more directly and actively engage various stakeholder groups throughout the research process.