April 2025
What are the messages on the management of the North Sea?
The North Sea is a space where the UK pursues a wide range of human activities. There are spatial overlaps between areas dedicated to marine conservation, suitable areas for offshore wind deployment, and oil and gas fields (Putuhena et al., 2023). As a result, the North Sea is crowded with human activities and installations, which are in competition with each other for space. Adding to this, the UK has a large set of policies addressing the management of the North Sea, from Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) for biodiversity, to licenses for oil and gas extractions, to consenting offshore wind farms, to managing fishing zones, shipping and tourism. Each of these policies conveys a specific message of what the North Sea is for. Policies can point to the priorities of governments and they can suggest to societies what’s thinkable and doable (Boettcher & Kim, 2022).
To understand the different policies governing the North Sea and to what extent they co-exist, align or counteract, and what effects this interaction has in practice, in my PhD I analysed qualitative interviews and archival data to generate a comprehensive picture of all the policies likely to address climate change mitigation across biodiversity, climate, and energy policy domains, and explored the effects of these policies on the uptake of offshore wind in the North Sea.
My findings highlight that the competition for space among different activities in the North Sea is translated into tension between policy messages for the management of the North Sea. Policies for energy security aim to maintain the status quo, conveying a message to prolong oil and gas extractions. Policies for climate change mitigation aim to reach Net Zero by diffusing offshore wind, among other renewable energy technologies. Policies for biodiversity conservation aim to transform how we address ecosystems, conveying a message to protect for nature. To resolve this tension, activities are unofficially prioritized by the government over others, as argued by several interviewees.
In the context of the North Sea, the primary activity is the extraction of oil and gas, followed by the diffusion of offshore wind, and concluded with the preservation and conservation of marine ecosystems. Additionally, we see insufficient monitoring of MPAs and poor developments of Highly Protected Marine Areas (HPMAs) – which would give the highest biodiversity preservation standard to marine areas. These observations all suggests that the government’s message on North Sea management is louder when talking about energy security and decarbonization than about biodiversity conversation.
Market-based policies and private actors
The analysis points to a critical insight: the North Sea is managed under a market-based, financial-oriented policy framework that supports private actors. In fact, oil and gas subsidies aim to maintain (or even expand) the activities of offshore oil and gas industries, the Contract for Difference scheme intend to diffuse offshore wind by financially supporting developers towards the Net Zero, and the MPA network allows us to preserve marine ecosystems through financial compensation in the context of increasing offshore activities, including the expansion of offshore wind farms and oil and gas fields. To this end, there is a red thread among all these policy-messages; the North Sea is a centrally-managed space for private actors.
Unavoidably incoherent?
These insights all point to practical questions on how to manage a crowded space that appears to be governed by fragmented and isolated policymaking.
Each policy domain advances their own message of what is the North Sea for. These messages are not neutral: they are charged in how governmental funding supports some of them, forming an unofficial hierarchy of activities at sea.
On these grounds, the North Sea is a space for protected marine ecosystems. It is also a space for offshore wind farms. Flunking the climate and ecological crises, the North Sea is still seen as a space to extract oil and gas.
Practical recommendations
After all these insights, one could ask: so, what? I intend to address this point with three policy recommendations.
Firstly, acknowledging spatial constraints in the design of policies targeting the North Sea, the Government should adopt official hierarchies prioritising decarbonization and biodiversity conservation to help resolve spatial competition between activities in the North Sea.
Secondly, the Government should shift financial and labour resources from oil and gas companies to biodiversity conservation. For example, providing finances to monitor MPAs and establishing HMPAs would signal significant change in the messages of governments.
Finally, biodiversity conservation concerns should be addressed in policies for every offshore activity in the North Sea. This would allow us to explore trade-offs between offshore activities while taking in transformative messages to mitigate the climate and ecological crises.
Cited works:
Valeria Zambianchi, is a postdoc at the Earth and Life Institute at UC Louvain (Belgium). Valeria’s PhD received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 853168).
The opinions expressed in this blog are the authors' and not necessarily those of the wider Link membership.
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