Funding programme

‍Horizon Europe is the European Union’s main funding programme for research and innovation.

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Call overview

This call aims to advance knowledge, tools, and monitoring systems to assess, minimise, and potentially achieve net-positive cumulative environmental impacts of large-scale offshore wind deployment.

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Expected Outcome

The EU’s Offshore Strategy underlines that the deployment of offshore wind should be based on maritime spatial planning, assessing the economic, social, and environmental sustainability of the installations in a life-cycle perspective, while ensuring co-existence with other activities such as commercial and recreational uses of the sea and fishing. At the same time, it calls for research on the cumulative impacts of offshore energy generation on the environment, which was also underlined in the Communication on Delivering on the EU offshore renewable energy ambitions (2023).

Our knowledge on such impacts, positive and negative, is more advanced now than when the Offshore Strategy was adopted. However, there are still significant data and knowledge gaps. Most fieldwork studies have been carried out at very localised sites and often focused on specific species. These ad-hoc studies lead to conclusions that can hardly be generalised. A sound monitoring, measuring multiple pressures and impacts on ecosystems and their services, at wider scale and in interaction with other sea activities, is still largely missing. There is also a need to further develop models and other instruments for environmental risk assessment, identification of mitigation measures and recommendations for restoration measures, considering impacts during construction, operation and maintenance, repowering and decommissioning.

Improving instruments, data, and knowledge on the cumulative environmental impacts of offshore energy, as well as a sound monitoring, is key to ensure that its expected fast and large-scale deployment will be sustainable. It will also better equip the EU to contribute to mitigate such impacts and promote sustainable deployment of offshore wind at regional (e.g., through OSPAR in the Northeast Atlantic) or subregional (e.g., through the Greater North Sea basin Initiative) level.

Project results are expected to contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:

• The scientific community, public authorities, project designers, permitting authorities, civil society organisations and citizens have better tools (including Maritime Spatial Planning tools), reliable data and knowledge to monitor, assess and minimise the cumulative environmental, including on biodiversity, and socio-ecological impacts of large-scale bottom-fixed and floating offshore wind energy generation, including at sea-basin level and when combined with other planned or existing human activities;
• The monitoring of cumulative environmental impacts, including on biodiversity, of offshore wind installations is improved, with better tools and open data, in a coherent scheme with pre-existing monitoring programs of the marine environment at large scale;
• Ambitious national and regional offshore wind deployment targets are achieved with positive or minimum negative impacts on the marine and coastal environment;
• Deploy offshore wind energy with minimal impact on marine and coastal ecosystems, and, if possible, with net-positive ones.

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Scope

Proposals are expected to address at least five of the following aspects:

• Provide better knowledge and understanding of the cumulative environmental impacts of the offshore wind energy deployment according to the EU targets, when added to the current and planned human activities carried out in the same areas;
• Expand existing studies, field monitoring, and analysis from local to larger areas, and from site- or species-specific impacts to more general ones. Further develop and deploy field monitoring activities, measuring multiple pressures and impacts on marine and coastal ecosystems and their services, as well as pollution, from installation to decommissioning and possible repowering, including operational phase and maintenance activities;
• Test and demonstrate field monitoring and modelling technologies that allow to go beyond state-of-knowledge, regarding life-cycle environmental impacts of offshore wind energy deployments;
• Improve instruments and models for Maritime Spatial Planning, and environmental assessments at plan and project level that are in alignment with public authorities’ needs;
• Improve modelling capacity and environmental impact assessments of future offshore wind deployment;
• Support the identification of areas where wind energy deployment is particularly suitable without significant environmental impact and areas where on the contrary, it should be avoided;
• Identify strategies, test, and demonstrate technologies that avoid, minimise, mitigate and compensate the environmental impact of bottom-fixed and floating offshore wind energy systems, propose mitigation and restoration measures and if feasible, provide net-positive environmental impacts. The activities carried out under this point are expected to achieve TRL 5 by the end of the project.

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Eligibility

To be eligible for funding, applicants must be established in one of the following countries:

• the Member States of the European Union, including their outermost regions;
• the Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs) linked to the Member States;
• countries associated to Horizon Europe;
• low- and middle-income countries.

See specifics in the General Annexes document, page 9.

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Consortium composition

Only legal entities forming a consortium are eligible to participate in actions provided that the consortium includes, as beneficiaries, three legal entities independent from each other and each established in a different country as follows:

• at least one independent legal entity established in a Member State; and
• at least two other independent legal entities, each established in different Member States or Associated Countries.

To ensure a balanced portfolio covering multiple geographical areas, grants will be awarded to applications not only in order of ranking, but priority will be given to high-ranking proposals that ensure, collectively, the best coverage of the different European sea basins(Atlantic Ocean, Baltic Sea, Black Sea, North Sea and Mediterranean Sea), provided that the proposals attain all thresholds.

Budget

The total indicative budget for the topic is EUR 15.00 million.

The Commission estimates that an EU contribution of around EUR 5.00 million per project would allow these outcomes to be addressed appropriately.