Energy

Growing environmental and economic costs of fossil fuels and the looming threat of climate change have spurred global interest in renewable energy sources. In the oceans, offshore renewable energy projects are in various stages of planning, approval, and construction at sites around the world. This new and often controversial player on the marine management stage has spurred policymakers to look toward more proactive and comprehensive forms of management decisionmaking in order to balance long term ecosystem health and the needs of existing ocean users with potential new development. Assessing tradeoffs associated with management alternatives in this way is an explicit part of comprehensive, ecosystem based, marine spatial planning, yet few tools have existed to allow quantitative tradeoff assessment. Here we extend tradeoff analyses from economics to simultaneously assess multiple ecosystem services and the values they provide to sectors using a robust, quantitative framework. We illustrate the framework using a bioeconomic model case study of offshore wind energy development in Massachusetts, demonstrating spatially explicit conflicts among wind energy, commercial fishing and whale watching sectors. We show how the framework can identify more efficient management alternatives that mitigate tradeoffs and minimize losses to incumbent sectors associated with new development. In this case study, we find that using marine spatial planning over single sector approaches could prevent millions of dollars in annual losses to the fishery and whale watching sectors and generate $10s million in annual gains to the energy sector. By making tradeoffs explicit, this approach improves transparency in decisionmaking and helps avoid unnecessary conflicts due to perceived tradeoffs that in fact are weak or non-existent, thus focusing debate on finding the best solutions to mitigate real tradeoffs associated with offshore energy development. This framework can help to rationalize what have typically been contentious debates over renewable energy development.