SEAFIRE · Path towards a sustainable Mediterranean Sea: mitigation actions to cope with Marine Heat Waves

Path towards a sustainable Mediterranean Sea: mitigation actions to cope with Marine Heat Waves

The ocean has stored at least 89% of the excess heat due to human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, making climate change irreversible [1]. Ocean warming trends over the past 50 years have not been homogenous, and some regions known as Marine Hotspots have experienced warming at a rate faster than 90% of the rest of the oceans [2]. Superimposed on these long-term trends, devastating Marine Heat Waves (MHWs) are defined as episodes of anomalous warming in the ocean that can last from a few days to months [3]. These extreme events have drawn scientific and public attention in recent years due to their dramatic consequences on marine ecosystems and their associated strong socio-economic impacts [4]. To this date, the reported economic losses owing to MHWs modification of ecosystem services amount to billions of dollars [5]. Due to their abrupt nature, MHWs can rapidly push marine ecosystems beyond the limits of resilience preventing adaptation and acclimatisation [6]. In this sense, these extreme events can have worse effects than those emanating from progressive long-term global warming. Understanding how marine ecosystems respond to climate change, and in particular to MHWs, has been recognized as a major societal challenge, and there is an evident socio-economic need for a wide range of tools such as management and conservation plans to cope with the disruptive MHWs in order to prevent species depletion and ensure seafood provisioning [7]. Coupling physics and ecosystem functioning is necessary to address these needs. Within this context, SEAFIRE aims at (i) providing relevant information about the impact of MHWs by characterising them, (ii) improving our understanding of the marine ecosystem’s responses to these extreme events, (iii) proposing mitigation actions and testing their potential effectiveness on the Western Mediterranean Sea, a major marine Hotspot. References: [1] Von Schukmann et al., (2020), Earth Syst. Sci. 12,2013-2041, [2] Hobday and Pecl (2014). Fish.Biol, 24, 415-425, [3] Hobday et al., (2016). Progress in Oceanography, 141, 227-238, [4] Olivier et al., (2020), Annual Review of Marine Science,13,313-342,[5] Smith et al., (2021) Science, 374(6566), eabj3593 [6] Gruber et al., (2021), Nature, 600 (7889), 395-407,[7] Boyce et al., (2020) Nat.Commun., 11, 2235,

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