Stakeholders of marine and maritime research and innovation co-create R&I agenda for the Baltic Sea and North Sea regions.

Close to 100 online participants representing policy makers, funders and institutions dealing with marine, maritime and socio-economic issues, together with the scientific community ofthe 13 Baltic and North Sea countries confirmed this week the broad themes of the future Baltic and North Sea Research and Innovation Programme (BANOS).

The draft Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (BANOS SRIA), prepared by a dedicated drafting team consisting of over 20 experts of their fields, has been widely consulted in three consecutive days during the BANOS Strategic Orientation Workshop (BANOS SOW). It will ultimately provide the basis for the future BANOS calls for interdisciplinary and transnational projects that will seek to generate new knowledge and innovationin support of the decision-making in the Baltic and North Sea regions.

“We are extremely pleasedwith the outcome of this BANOS SOW Webinar. We generated important interest and received some 150 suggestions on the draft SRIA by our online participants”, said Dr. Andris Andrusaitis, the Coordinator of BANOS Coordination and Support Action (BANOS CSA) and the Acting Executive Director of BONUS EEIG. “Nearly half of our online participants represented policymakers, which is hitting our target also in involving the knowledge end-users in BANOS from the very early stages on in order to respond to their knowledge needs in the making of the SRIA”, Andrusaitis added.

The defined scope of the future programme together with the mapped national and transnational research and innovation priorities are resulting now into three strategic objectives of the future BANOS Programme: A. Healthy Seas and Coasts, B. Sustainable Blue Economy and C. Human Wellbeing. In addition, there are nine specific objectives and a total of 30 research & innovation themes grouped under these three Strategic Objectives included in the draft SRIA.

“The development of the BANOS SRIA is a process which means that it will continue to be updated regularly in order to keep it responding to the realities we operate in”, added Dr. Karoliina Koho, the coordinator of the entire SRIA process. “Also, it is the ecosystem-based management which forms truly the precondition for achieving all these objectives and the scope of the entire programme is defined by three key attributes of ‘close connection to the ecosystem’, ‘dependence on climate impact’ and ‘geographic relevance to the Baltic and North Sea’."

”Now the numerous suggestions received during the workshop will be scrutinized by the drafting team and SRIA will be finalized in the coming months."

The next important step towards launching the BANOS Programmewill be designing the mechanisms for itsfunding and implementation. “We strongly believe that having an ambitious and potentially impactful SRIA will facilitate further negotiations among the funders of research and innovation of 13 BANOS countries”, Andrusaitis concluded.