ETC/ICM Report 3/2019: Biodiversity in Europe's seas

13 Jan 2020

David Vaughan, Samuli Korpinen, Henrik Nygård, Jesper H. Andersen, Ciarán Murray, Emilie Kallenbach, Jørgen Nørrevang Jensen, Leonardo Tunesi, Giulia Mo, Sabrina Agnesi, Cristina Vina-Herbon, Gemma Singleton, Kalliopi Pagou, Katya Klančnik

This report seeks to provide an overall view of the state of biodiversity across in Europe’s seas in order to help answer questions posed by European policy and international obligations on whether the loss of biodiversity has been reduced. It is a thematic assessment of Biodiversity which combines existing assessment results from a range of regional and international sources, alongside with integrating approaches and tools to assess biodiversity trend and status at a European level.
Existing assessments have provided different perspectives of the status of biodiversity in meeting different policy objectives to provide an overall synthesis of outcomes at the European level and to assess whether the overall picture aligns with the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020 in its headline target to halt biodiversity loss by 2020 (EC, 2011).
This report does not attempt to utilise results from Member States updates reported under the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) as these results were still being assembled when this report was being finalised. However, the report does draw on assessments and messages produced by the Regional Seas Conventions, and other regional or international sources and brings them together to look for common themes and messages. The report is divided into the following sections:

1. Why evaluate biodiversity in Europe’s Seas?
2. Safeguarding biodiversity is at the heart of the ‘living well within limits’ agenda
3. Status & trends in European marine life
4. The Ecosystem Approach: Integrated Biodiversity Assessments
5. Synthesis & Outlook for Marine Biodiversity

Prepared by:

Lead authors: David Vaughan (JNCC), Samuli Korpinen, Henrik Nygård (SYKE), Jesper H. Andersen, Ciarán Murray, Emilie Kallenbach (NIVA Denmark), Jørgen Nørrevang Jensen (ICES), Leonardo Tunesi, Giulia Mo, Sabrina Agnesi (ISPRA), Cristina Vina-Herbon, Gemma Singleton (JNCC), Kalliopi Pagou (HCMR) and Katya Klančnik (IWRS)

EEA project manager: Johnny Reker
Editor: Ángel Borja (AZTI)
Coordination: Christiane Katterfeld (UFZ)
Language Check: Shane Hume (CENIA)
Layout: F&U confirm, Leipzig

Published by: ETC/ICM, December 2019, 92 pp.