Enhancing Adaptive Capacity for Sustainable Blue Growth (BlueAdapt)

Blue treasures – rivers, lakes and marine waters – provide great potential for economic growth. Activities, like agriculture, peat and hydropower production threaten those, and climate change impacts food and energy systems creating socio-ecological risks. Curbing negative trends into opportunities like transition to new business models, calls for adaptive governance, which is agile, predictable, and science-based. The project develops a science/policy-interface by integrating cutting edge ecological modelling with economic, policy and regulatory analysis. Together with firms we examine how value-creating solutions support blue growth. Analysing obstacles to adaptation and best ways the government can promote transition to sustainable blue growth, we craft regulatory strategies for the use of new information. With stakeholders we co-create solutions for sustainable growth and good ecological status of waters and compile them into Adaptive Governance Framework for Blue Economy (AGORA).