DOCTORAL CANDIDATE
Huixin (Luna) Wu

SUPERVISORS
Olivier Thébaud, Institut Français de Recherche pour l’Exploitation de la Mer (IFREMER)
Emily Ogier, University of Tasmania (UTAS)

Marine and Fisheries Economics, Environmental Economics and Policy, Econometrics Modelling

Offshore wind energy has rapidly emerged as a promising source of renewable energy, but it also presents multiple challenges. This includes conflicts with fishing activities, resulting from the competition for space, as well as potential cascading effects resulting from fishing effort displacement, which can result in economic losses for the fishing industry.

In the face of this challenge, the current approach to impact assessments and potential compensation has largely borrowed from the project-by-project impact assessment approaches used for land-based industrial developments. Given the fluidity of marine ecosystems and the adaptive capacity of the fishing industry, there is a need to develop systematic assessment methods and tools which enable assessing aggregate impacts across multiple projects, considering the potential interactions between the effects of individual projects. This implies evaluating the dynamics of spatial and economic responses of fishing activities to spatial exclusion, taking into account the ecological, economic and regulatory drivers, which influence these responses, as well as the governance regimes which could enable integrating such understanding in determining spatial allocation and compensation across sectors.

The project will develop an economic analysis of the complex interactions between wind energy development at sea and the structure of fishing activities, considering the cumulative impacts of multiple wind farm developments on spatial crowding of fishing areas, the associated changes in economic incentives for fishers, and the resulting changes in fishing activities. It will involve case studies of offshore wind energy developments and their interactions with commercial fishing in France and Australia. Surveys of key stakeholders will be carried out to gain insights into the main adaptive responses likely to be observed from the fishing industry following the implementation of wind energy projects, as well as drivers and constraints likely to influence these responses.

Using the increasingly fine-resolution data available regarding the spatial distribution of commercial fishing activities and production as well as data relating to the economic operations of fishing fleets, the research will develop and apply spatial econometric modelling techniques to examine the potential impacts of alternative wind energy development scenarios at multiple scales (from local to regional), and assess cumulative impacts across projects. Results will be used to inform alternative approaches to factoring fishery impacts in the strategic planning of offshore wind development.