7g Empowering Communities with a Multi-Use Decision Support Dashboard to Participate in Marine Renewable Energy Planning and Development

The marine environment is a vast resource that has great potential for meeting the world’s growing energy demand. Increasing the abundance of marine renewable energy (MRE) projects would expand a renewable energy portfolio that supports economic prosperity and energy security. However, as is the case with any offshore development, MRE projects require informed and collaborative marine spatial planning (MSP) to overcome significant sociocultural, ecological and environmental, and economic barriers that may limit responsible and accelerated deployment. This challenge is exacerbated by competing values held by a diverse set of stakeholders, including disadvantaged communities that may lack technical expertise. We propose to collaborate with community organizations, Redwood Community Action Agency and Santa Barbara Maritime Museum, to engage disadvantaged community members to guide development of a user-friendly dashboard to give all stakeholders a data-driven voice in the MRE planning and development process. The dashboard will enable interactive visualization and synthesis of multiple layers of ocean use data to promote meaningful stakeholder engagement and communications, and informed and inclusive decision-making, and will be a significant advancement in ocean multi-use management with MRE. Phase I efforts will (1) engage disadvantaged community members in design charrettes for input and feedback on features of interest and utility (e.g., tradeoff analysis, competing use analysis, strategic mapping products), data workflows, functionality, and technical specifications for development of a user-friendly dashboard to advance ocean multi-use management with MRE, (2) develop community-selected prototype dashboard features, and (3) test prototype dashboard features in collaboration with community partners in regions affected by MRE project planning – Northern and Central Coasts of California. Ocean multi-use and blue justice concerns are expanding, and therefore, conflicts over marine resources and spatial competition between marine industries are projected to increase. MSP is critical to any offshore development including offshore wind, wave and tidal energy, deep-sea mining, aquaculture, desalination, other Blue Economy markets, as well as for upgrades to existing infrastructure and construction of new infrastructure to support expanding and emerging marine activities. The proposed dashboard will contribute to effective and equitable MSP processes for a number of maritime sectors, and will benefit sociocultural, ecological and environmental, regulatory, and technological challenges, all of which will contribute to economic benefits to marine industries while respecting environmental justice issues.