Social license for multi use offshore installations

This work is being conducted in the EU H2020 project The Blue Growth Farm (BGF). It's focus is on the concept of social license to operate and its relevance to Multipurpose Ofshore Installations (MOIs). Some results obtained in the BGF project from a stakeholder workshop and surveys are here presented. Social license is defined as the acceptance of an activity and its operator by local communities and communities of interest in return for certain terms and conditions. Previous work shows that in some cases there is a lack of social license for aquaculture in near-shore waters (see for example Galspasoro et al., 2020). This reduces the amount of space available for the activity and can increase conflict and costs related to planning and legal complications. Concerns related to aquaculture are its environmental and visual impacts, and competition with other users of the sea, such as tourism and fishing (see for example Billing, 2018 and Galspasoro et al 2020). As there aren’t any of these devices currently in use in Europe, we’ve selected two hypothetical cases – one where the BGF test platform is actually being deployed, in Reggio Calabria in the straights of Messina, Southern Italy and the other, which has been selected as a plausible site for a full scale deployment off the coast of Islay, Scotland. Despite the overall positive opinion of MOIs that participants in our survey had, our results show us that social license for offshore multi-use platforms is not guaranteed. Like many other activities it may be contingent on the benefits that it can bring to a local area and the strategies used to facilitate the relationship between the developers/ operators, other users of the sea, local communities and stakeholders. We can also see that there is difference in opinions around the two technologies. This may influence overall opinions about MOIs – for example seems that renewable technologies pull the MOI into a more positive position. We can also see that there is room for improvement in trust in regulators – the question is how this lack of trust might interact with social license for MOIs and if it does, what measures are needed to improve trust. Additional insight is expcted from further activity planned through a final workshop and survey