Key Expoitable Results (KERs)

Managing the risks associated with human activities and uses in marine and coastal regions is crucial in a time of maritime activity expansion promoted by Blue Growth, especially with the increasing effects of climate change. Effective management of the cumulative risks is essential to safeguard ecosystems from potential further degradation, maintaining their resistance and resilience and ability to provide ecosystem services (ES) and societal goods and benefits (SGB). Here, we adopt a cumulative risk-based approach to assess risk to habitats and ecosystems, considering human activities and two climate-derived pressures for three management narratives, across three IPCC Shared Socioeconomic Pathways in the northern marine and coastal region of Portugal. Our findings highlight high ecosystem risk in some marine areas and coastal segments, particularly affecting beaches, aphotic soft and rock bottoms, and estuarine areas. Across the management and climate scenarios, the most important contributors to risk included rising sea surface temperatures, increased coastal exposure to relative sea-level rise (SLR) and storminess, fishing, tourism, artificial areas, and maritime transport. Overall spatial risk patterns varied more with changes in management scenarios than between climate scenarios, with climate pressures having an additive effect on habitat and ecosystem risk. The inclusion of the climate-derived exogenous pressures (i.e. those whose causes emanate from outside the management system) altered the high-risk zone spatial patterns at the land-sea interface, while in marine areas, it increased the overall risk scores without changing the observed overall risk patterns. It is recommended that policymakers and managers should adopt a precautionary approach, using cumulative assessments integrated into decision-support systems and ecosystem-based management plans to anticipate and adapt to or mitigate future changes. Thereby, ensuring the maintenance of the ecosystem resilience to change, to avoid reaching tipping points that would disrupt the resource-provisioning capacity of these ecosystems and the provision of ES and SGB.

This policy brief explores the challenges and opportunities for fostering equitable, long-term international scientific cooperation in ocean sciences across the Atlantic. Developed through collaboration between European, Brazilian, and South African partners working in the EU-funded AtlantECO project, this policy brief highlights the need for fair, ethical, and inclusive research practices that respect different cultures and local realities. Despite various international agreements, significant barriers remain, including disparities in research capacity, funding, and technology access. Bureaucratic hurdles and the prevalence of “parachute science” further limit meaningful collaboration. Strengthening infrastructure, streamlining administrative processes, promoting research mobility, expanding open-access research, and fostering co-funding mechanisms are essential steps toward a more balanced research landscape. This brief advocates for a more inclusive and effective approach to Ocean science by addressing these challenges, ensuring equitable participation in marine research and supporting sustainable ocean management.

This policy brief highlights the urgent need to align scientific innovation with marine policy, enhance transatlantic cooperation across Europe, Africa, and South America, and accelerate the uptake of bio-based and nature-based solutions to support a Sustainable Blue Economy. Despite a robust framework of international and European policies, implementation remains fragmented, with limited integration of scientific knowledge into policy. Marine microbiomes represent a promising frontier for sustainability, offering new opportunities for environmental restoration and economic growth. However, realizing their potential requires coherent regulatory frameworks and equitable access and benefit-sharing mechanisms. The AtlantECO project demonstrates the power of interdisciplinary research, collaborative innovation networks, and evidence-based policy to tackle ocean challenges across the Atlantic basin. Key recommendations in this brief focus on reinforcing transatlantic collaboration, improving the science-policy interface, and building shared systems for ocean knowledge and innovation. These measures are essential to advancing climate resilience, ocean health, and equitable economic development throughout the All-Atlantic community. The brief ultimately aims to elevate awareness, build capacity, promote responsible practices, and catalyse a Blue Growth strategy that unites the All-Atlantic region, aligned with AtlantECO’s mission.

This policy brief highlights the strategic importance of the Ocean microbiome genetic resource within the interconnected frameworks of One Ocean and One Health, recognising that ocean ecosystem health, climate regulation, biodiversity, and human wellbeing are deeply interdependent. Marine microorganisms underpin global biogeochemical cycles, support marine food webs and fisheries, and provide vast genetic diversity with major potential for innovation in biotechnology, healthcare, environmental remediation, aquaculture, and climate mitigation. As such, the Ocean microbiome represents both a critical scientific frontier and a major socio-economic opportunity. The brief emphasises that Digital Sequence Information (DSI) derived from marine genetic resources circulates globally, creating governance challenges for existing Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) frameworks under the CBD and the emerging BBNJ Agreement. Because the ocean spans Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) and Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ), and because DSI can move independently of physical samples, ensuring transparency, traceability, and equitable benefit-sharing is complex. Jurisdictional fragmentation, incomplete metadata standards, and limited interoperability across databases further complicate monitoring and reporting. Analysis of international sequence databases reveals significant geographic imbalances: the majority of Ocean microbiome samples originate from the Northern Hemisphere and from EEZs, while access to these resources is overwhelmingly dominated by countries in the Global North. These disparities highlight capacity gaps between regions and reinforce concerns about equity in the digital age. The brief calls for strengthened monitoring and reporting protocols for DSI, including mandatory and harmonised metadata standards, coordinated integration of access metrics across major data platforms, and improved interoperability among diverse data repositories. It further supports governance approaches that balance open science with fair and equitable benefit-sharing, alongside targeted capacity-building to ensure broader global participation. By aligning science, policy, and equity, the Ocean microbiome genetic resource can be governed in a way that advances sustainable development, strengthens the blue economy, and delivers on the principles of One Ocean, One Health.

The ocean plays a central role in the global carbon cycle. It regulates atmospheric CO₂ through long-term sequestration in coastal and deep-sea systems. Blue Carbon Ecosystems (BCEs)—mangroves, salt marshes, seagrass meadows, and tidal flats—are recognized for their high carbon burial efficiency per unit area and their growing relevance in climate policy. In contrast, the open ocean, driven by the Biological Carbon Pump (BCP), dominates large-scale carbon storage but is rarely considered alongside coastal systems in carbon budget assessments. Here, we present a basin-scale assessment of carbon sequestration across the Atlantic coastal and open-ocean domains. To do so, we quantified carbon fluxes and long-term stocks by harmonizing and integrating spatial datasets, Earth System Model outputs, and a data-assimilated biogeochemical framework. Coastal ecosystems show high sequestration efficiency per unit area. The open ocean, however, accounts for most of the total carbon storage due to its depth, extent, and circulation-driven redistribution of remineralized carbon. By creating a unified framework that allows to combine coastal burial processes with pelagic carbon transfer in a consistent way, this study clarifies how different definitions of sequestration shape basin-scale estimates. The results provide a robust basis for improving representation of marine carbon processes in regional and global carbon budgets, marine conservation strategies, and climate mitigation planning.

Tropicalisation and other climate-induced range shifts are rapidly restructuring global biodiversity patterns. The detection of range shifts is often complex and requires big-data approaches. Environmental DNA (eDNA) monitoring is emerging as a powerful method for assessing biodiversity changes at unprecedented spatial and temporal resolutions. While eDNA-based methodologies continue to evolve, the impacts of species traits and eDNA dynamics are rarely measured, though they likely affect our eDNA data interpretation. Here we combine diverse methodologies to better understand processes affecting eDNA data and to elucidate how eDNA dispersal influences the interpretation of eDNA results in a tropicalisation context.