Scope
The demands on marine space in UK waters have never been greater, driven by the need to:
- provide energy security
- develop essential renewable energy infrastructure
- create social and economic value
- ensure the restoration and future resilience of marine biodiversity and ecosystem services
The Ecological Effects of Floating Offshore Wind (ECOFlow) research programme will focus on enhancing understanding of how marine ecosystems will respond to the planned large-scale expansion of floating offshore wind (FLOW) infrastructure in UK waters in the next decade. The programme will address critical evidence needs of government and industry that are required to inform policy and decision making.
Aspirations for offshore wind in the UK are high, both to meet the demands of the British Energy Security Strategy (BESS) and the UK’s international climate change obligations as set out by the Committee on Climate Change (CCC). The target within the BESS is to install 5GW of FLOW by 2030, progressing at pace from smaller demonstrator projects to full scale commercial projects in the next five years. Continued growth around the UK is anticipated to 2050, when FLOW installation is expected to account for 50% of the CCC’s 125GW target.
While research on ecological effects associated with fixed offshore wind infrastructure in shallower UK coastal seas has grown rapidly in the last two years, significant research gaps remain in understanding the ecological effects associated with FLOW infrastructure in deeper waters offshore. The ECOFlow programme’s research will address some of the significant gaps in understanding that have been identified by government and industry (see ‘Additional information’), in areas such as the cumulative assessment of the effects of deploying FLOW at scale on marine ecosystems, co-location of FLOW alongside some of the most productive fisheries in UK waters, and understanding the contribution FLOW can make to nature recovery.
The rapidly evolving technological innovations involved with FLOW infrastructure in deeper water environments require a research programme to investigate effects on the marine environment, how these potential effects interact with each other, and pressures from other human activities, to create new and complex challenges for the sustainable development of FLOW.
The ECOFlow programme’s three objectives are to:
- develop an enhanced understanding of the novel effects of FLOW infrastructure on marine ecosystems, transform the approach to deploying FLOW infrastructure at scale while maintaining nature recovery, and its coexistence with other users of the sea, particularly fisheries
- utilise autonomous sensing technologies to establish innovative underwater sampling and monitoring approaches within and around the complex infrastructure associated with FLOW
- deliver robust evidence, new approaches and tools that will enable the acceleration of impact in policy and industry, and support government’s ambitions in the Celtic Sea off the coasts of South Wales and South West England and the North Sea’s Scottish waters for the deployment of FLOW infrastructure, nature recovery and fisheries management
For the purposes of this funding opportunity, the Celtic Sea is defined as the regions off the coasts of South Wales and South West England.
Programme challenges
The programme has three challenges that must be addressed within each application.
Challenge one: understanding the ecological effects of FLOW infrastructure on different trophic levels across critical ecosystem drivers and within the context of climate change
FLOW is a novel technology that is moving from test deployment to commercial scale in a much shorter timescale than fixed offshore wind. It is also being deployed further offshore in areas not suitable for fixed offshore wind, with significantly different infrastructure in water depths up to 250 metres. As such, our understanding of the consequences of FLOW infrastructure on marine ecosystems is limited.
This challenge will require understanding of the effects of critical ecosystem drivers on lower trophic dynamics and supporting processes for higher trophic levels, as well as higher level ecosystem dynamics, for example, between epibenthos, fish, seabirds, and mammals. Projects should look to build on evidence and understanding of biogeochemical baselines, air-sea gas fluxes and turbulence and mixing to measure, understand and validate the impacts underpinning primary productivity and carbon cycling, as well as any permanent hydrological effects of FLOW. Evidence of impacts of FLOW on primary producers and community structure should be explored to underpin effects on higher trophic levels.
A step change is needed in the development of coupled system models, including ocean-meteorological hydrodynamics, ecosystem, and ecological, for the areas where FLOW is going to be deployed. A range of modelling approaches will be needed to deliver impact into management quickly. Projects should build on existing relevant research programmes, including but not limited to eSWEETS, ECOWind, INSITE, MERP, SSB, and OWEC. Consideration should be given to different geographical areas or complementary approaches to accelerate this step change and develop the mechanistic connections to allow true cumulative effects across trophic levels to be assessed.
Research addressing this challenge should seek to understand the impacts and interactions across all trophic levels within the physical, chemical, and ecological footprint of FLOW infrastructure. This could include consideration of:
- bottom-up ecosystem drivers
- aggregation effects
- predator-prey interactions
- population-level distribution
- effects for marine mammals and elasmobranch species of concern, for example benthic and pelagic sharks and rays
- effects on lower trophic levels and the epibenthos
Challenge two: developing new ways to monitor and assess the environmental effects of FLOW infrastructure
NERC’s Future Marine Research Infrastructure programme will support marine research with next generation autonomous platform and sensor systems that can operate in challenging marine environments. This challenge will build on this and develop new underwater sampling approaches to leverage innovation in autonomous sensing technologies to sample in, around, and under the complex infrastructure associated with FLOW in support of Challenge one research.
The offshore areas where FLOW is being deployed, and the nature of FLOW infrastructure, present unique technological challenges and opportunities for understanding the marine environment. Complexity arises from the individual turbine level to array or regional scale, which can produce substantially different effects. Projects should look to rapidly advance existing operational techniques and work closely with industry partners to enable their use for underwater sampling in, around and under floating structures. This could include the use of large ships, including those funded by government and industry, alongside autonomous sampling capability with real time assessment and adaptive capability.
FLOW is at a stage where there are test sites that are already operational, alongside significant planned deployment in areas such as the Celtic Sea, where there is very limited infrastructure associated oil, gas, and the fixed offshore wind industries. Sampling strategies should work with industry partners and, where possible, use existing data sets from industry and government to establish baselines before construction, during construction and during operation to provide long term concurrent data of biology, physics, and other ecological variables.
You will need to take advantage of existing and emerging technologies to develop new ways of monitoring and analysing key variables at the required spatio-temporal scales and frequencies. This could include linking tagging and tracking of marine mammals and elasmobranchs to population modelling and effects of floating structures. New approaches might also include in-situ monitoring within arrays to assess the effects of electromagnetic fields on key benthic and pelagic species, and emerging capability in automated, in situ plankton imaging and classification.
Challenge three: supporting nature recovery and ecologically sustainable development of FLOW infrastructure
The demands on marine space in UK waters have never been greater. With the planned expansion of FLOW, the UK governments and industry need research outcomes from ECOFlow in as short a time as possible to support policy and decision making. This requires the programme, and its projects, to proactively and continually engage with policy makers, regulators, industry, and decision makers to link the outcomes of the ECOFlow research to real world challenges that arise from large scale expansion of FLOW installations. ECOFlow research needs to support the evolution of the UK marine policy landscape to adapt to an expansion of FLOW, including:
- supporting plan and project level environmental assessment
- cumulative effects
- options for spatial and temporal coexistence
- nature recovery and consideration of natural capital approaches within decision making
To address this challenge, you will need to work closely with government and industry to ensure the timely delivery of the robust evidence, and the useful new approaches and tools, that are needed to support ambitions for the deployment of FLOW infrastructure, nature recovery, and sustainable fisheries. As such, partnerships with existing programmes within government, for example Defra, Marine Scotland, and their agencies, The Crown Estate (TCE), and industry are strongly encouraged. For evidence to be used within decision making, there needs to be strong alignment and validation with government, so co-development and co-delivery will be required. Similarly, the offshore wind industry is innovating rapidly, and you should look to engage with developers to understand their challenges and their responses to them.
There is an overarching need to consider nature recovery in the deployment of FLOW infrastructure, including policy areas such as marine net gain (English waters), marine environmental enhancement (Scottish waters) and building resilience of marine ecosystems (Welsh waters). You should, wherever possible, look to consider this as a key impact pathway.
In addition, the opportunities and challenges arising from the coexistence of activities is a rapidly evolving area for the planning of FLOW that applicants could potentially address, considering both the ecological and socioeconomic angles. There are also other areas identified by government and industry (see ‘Additional information’ section) that applicants may look to address. For example, with fisheries this includes understanding effects on fishing areas due to displacement, development of fishing friendly array design, and understanding effects on fish populations from electromagnetic fields likely to be observed at offshore wind farms. There is also an identified need for provision of guidance regarding marine mammals and elasmobranch species of concern when it comes to mitigation measures for collision and entanglement risk, and an understanding of secondary entanglement scenarios.
Programme outcomes
There are five outcomes that will need to be delivered by the end of the ECOFlow programme and each application is required to clearly outline how proposed research will contribute to these outcomes:
- enhance understanding of ecosystem responses to the cumulative pressures of large-scale deployment of FLOW infrastructure, in combination with other stressors
- provide a sound evidence base to inform decision-making for managing human activity and policy prioritisation associated with the delivery of an expansion of FLOW infrastructure
- demonstrate new innovative underwater sampling approaches for integrated marine observing to inform and support better understanding of the ecologically sustainable management of FLOW infrastructure
- provide a sound evidence base to inform policy and marine management responses in support of government’s ambitions in the Celtic Sea off the coast of South Wales and South West England and the North Sea’s Scottish waters for the deployment of FLOW infrastructure, nature recovery and fisheries management
- develop long-term relationships between NERC researchers, government, and the FLOW industry, built around rigorous applied research and long-term data management and archiving
For more information on the background of this funding opportunity, go to the ‘Additional information’ section.
Duration
The duration of this award must be 48 months.
Projects must start by 1 November 2024
Funding available
The FEC of your project can be up to £3.75 million.
The total cost of the project to NERC must not exceed £3 million.
We will fund 80% of the FEC with the following exceptions:
- justified equipment would be funded at 50%
- eligible costs for international project co-lead (previously co-investigator) involvement would be funded at 100%
- National Marine Facilities (NMF) costs will be funded at 100%
NMF costs must be included in the application and will count towards the funding limit. For example, if the NMF costs for supporting proposed ECOFlow research are £400,000, then only £2.6 million will be available to cover the 80% of full economic cost of the project.
The travel and subsistence costs for up to three members of each project team to attend annual programme science meetings should be included in the costs of your application.
It is expected that applications will included dedicate time for early engagement with potential project partners during both the full applications development phase if selected, and if successfully funded. It is expected that brokering agreements with project partners once funded will require dedicated project team resource and this should be factored in to planning. Applications should provide details of how engagement will be undertaken, and resourced, throughout the project. It is anticipated that fieldwork will not take place until the second year of projects, however, early outputs are required and details on how projects intend to engage with industry and government partners and stakeholders to identify meaningful early outputs which will have real-world impact should be included in applications.
ECOFlow is interested in the challenges of planned FLOW deployments in the North Sea’s Scottish waters and Celtic Sea off the coasts of South Wales and South West England. Two applications will be funded. Research should be focused on these regions of the Celtic Sea, North Sea or both, while outcomes should be more broadly applicable. At least one application will be funded where the outcomes demonstrate significant applicability to the specific challenges facing planned FLOW deployments in the Celtic Sea off the coast of South Wales and South West England.
What we will not fund
Services and facilities
You can apply to use a facility or resource in your funding application.
You should discuss your application with the facility or service at least two months before the funding opportunity’s closing date to:
- discuss the proposed work in detail
- receive confirmation that they can provide the services required within the timeframe of the funding
The facility will provide a technical assessment that includes the calculated cost of providing the service. NERC services and facilities must be costed within the limits of the funding.
You should not submit the technical assessment with the application, but you must confirm you have received it.
For more information, see the NERC research grants and fellowships handbook.
Read the full list of NERC facilities that require a technical assessment.
High Performance Computing (HPC), Ship-Time or Marine Equipment (SME) and the large research facilities at Harwell have their own policies for access and costing.
Ship-time and marine facilities
Applications may request NERC ship-time and other marine facilities. Projects will be required to start by 1 November 2024 and will need to factor into their implementation plans that the earliest NERC marine facilities may be available to support research will be sometime in the 2026 to 2027 NERC Marine Facilities programme (year two of funded ECOFlow projects). Projects requesting access to NERC marine facilities should engage with NERC Marine Planning at an early stage in the development of their application. This is to ensure any requested use of NERC’s Marine Facilities is realistic as the award of a grant will be subject to NERC marine planning. If a request is not realistic and so implementation plans will be delayed, NERC is unlikely to award an ECOFlow grant.
If you wish to use NERC’s marine facilities, you must complete an online ‘ship-time and marine equipment (SME) or autonomous deployment (ADF) application form’ available from Marine Facilities Planning.
Include the SME or ADF number on the ‘Facilities’ section of your application.
SMEs or ADFs must be submitted to and be approved by NERC Marine Planning by the time your outline funding application is submitted. Your request will be checked for feasibility in the year that access is requested. If it is approved an indicative cost will be provided for inclusion in your outline application. If the request is not considered feasible, amendments will then need to be made to the application or it will be rejected.
A PDF of the SME or ADF can be attached as a facility form to your application. If you do not do this, your request may not be considered for inclusion in the NERC Marine Facilities Programme.
If you intend to apply for NERC’s marine facilities, you should contact marineplanning@nerc.ukri.org to discuss ship-time and equipment needs as soon as possible and have submitted your SME or ADF by 13 February 2024.
All requests for marine facilities must be made at the outline funding application stage. No further requests can be made at the full application stage and only minor amendments made to existing requests.
Supporting skills and talent
We encourage you to follow the principles of the Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers and the Technician Commitment.
International collaboration
If your application includes international applicants, project partners or collaborators, visit UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)’s trusted research and innovation for more information on effective international collaboration.
Find out about getting funding for international collaboration.
Responsible research
Through our funding processes, we seek to make a positive contribution to society and the environment. This is not just through research outputs and outcomes but through the way in which research is conducted and facilities managed.
All NERC grant holders are to adopt responsible research practices as set out in the NERC responsible business statement.
Responsible research is defined as reducing harm or enhancing benefit on the environment and society through effective management of research activities and facilities. Specifically, this covers:
- the natural environment
- the local community
- equality, diversity and inclusion
You should consider the responsible research context of your project, not the host institution as a whole. You should take action to enhance your responsible research approach where practical and reasonable.
Research disruption due to COVID-19
We recognise that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused major interruptions and disruptions across our communities. We are committed to ensuring that individual applicants and their wider team, including partners and networks, are not penalised for any disruption to their career, such as:
- breaks and delays
- disruptive working patterns and conditions
- the loss of ongoing work
- role changes that may have been caused by the pandemic
Reviewers and panel members will be advised to consider the unequal impacts that COVID-19 related disruption might have had on the capability to deliver and career development of those individuals included in the application. They will be asked to consider the capability of the applicant, and their wider team, to deliver the research they are proposing.
Where disruptions have occurred, you can highlight this within your application if you wish, but there is no requirement to detail the specific circumstances that caused the disruption.
