Report of the analysis of climate change impacts on EU marine ecosystems

This report analyses the impacts of climate change on the marine environment and the consequence on these impacts on the achievement of Good Environmental Status (GES) in the European Seas. To this end, we used literature findings and numerical simulations performed with the JRC Blue2 modelling framework, to assess the potential impacts of climate change on the distance from GES of each descriptors defined in the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). Our results suggest that the impacts of climate change on the achievement of GES is, for most of the descriptors, highly heterogeneous in terms of direction of the impact (negative vs positive), intensity and geographical location (e.g. latitude), even at the sub-basin scale. Given this variability of responses, providing clear recommendations on how to deal with climate change within the MSFD is challenging. However, in cases where climate change is clearly expected to have substantial negative impacts on specific descriptors (i.e. pushing the descriptor away from GES), the use of more restrictive targets and measures is recommended. We also suggest that these targets and measures should be based on sub-basin specific features, such as latitude e.g. for the biodiversity descriptors, proximity to terrestrial inputs e.g. for the eutrophication descriptor, and hydrodynamic properties.