As platforms for dialogue, art-science collaborations hold the potential to cross disciplinary boundaries to better understand and engage the public in addressing sustainability challenges. Moving beyond documenting outcomes, this study details how researchers and composers combined science communication and artistic expression to co-produce performances as part of the Baltic Sea Festival Science Lab. Drawing on insights from a joint reflection process, we recount our motivations for participation, provide insights on the co-production processes of six researcher-composer pairs, and share our experiences of the performances. We highlight openness to other ways of working, different perspectives and opinions, and emergence as well as collaborative skills, including listening, communication, and problem-solving skills, as key enablers for crossing disciplinary boundaries in art-science collaborations. As answers to the question on how, why, and in what ways platforms for dialogue can turn into platforms for learning, we discuss opportunities for designing safe-enough spaces, working towards a shared goal while embracing the unfolding nature of a process, and engaging in reflection to follow up on and make sense of one’s learning. Through this study, we hope to provide guidance for those who wish to engage in art-science collaborations to co-produce pathways towards sustainable futures together.

Marine fisheries systems are increasingly impacted by climate-driven ecological and general socioeconomic changes, challenging their sustainability and the viability of dependent coastal communities. Traditional incremental adaptation strategies have proven insufficient, particularly in regions like the German Western Baltic Sea, where fisheries face severe declines in key species such as cod and herring due to climate change, overfishing, and eutrophication. Here, we employed qualitative exploratory scenario planning to envision plausible futures and to inform transformative adaptation strategies. Our approach highlighted critical areas for transformation: implementing ecosystem-based management, rethinking resource allocation, diversifying livelihoods, and enhancing transdisciplinary collaboration. These adaptation fields collectively address key features of successful transformative adaptation, including restructuring pathways, fostering innovation, and promoting multiscale and system-wide resilience. Our scenarios emphasize that effective climate preparedness and societal integration are crucial for navigating fisheries toward sustainable futures, underlining the urgent need for comprehensive and proactive adaptation strategies.

Marine ecosystems are facing multiple pressures from human activities, such as fishing and nutrient inputs from farming and agriculture, compounded by the global effects of climate change. As a result, the ecosystem services that societies depend on are at risk from the cumulative impact of these pressures. To better understand how different ecosystems respond, it is essential to assess their resilience. While predicting ecosystem resilience remains challenging, significant progress has been made in developing methods to measure it. In this study, we assessed resilience in four northern European marine ecosystems: the Icelandic Waters, the Barents Sea, the Baltic Sea, and the North Sea, spanning 3 to 5 decades. “Folded stability landscapes” were constructed for the Baltic and North Sea. This region provides a unique setting, with a south-north gradient from temperate to subarctic environments and a southeast-northwest gradient from open to semienclosed topographies. The Icelandic Waters and Barents Sea evolved relatively continuously, while the Baltic Sea and North Sea underwent more drastic changes. By comparing results across these gradients, we explore the role of isolation, level of pressures, and food web complexity in shaping resilience patterns and discuss the implications for managing resilient marine ecosystems in the future.

The ecological role, bloom extent and long-term dynamics of jellyfishes are mostly overlooked due to sampling limitations, leading to the lack of continuous long-term datasets. A rise in frequency and magnitude of jellyfish invasion around the world is shedding new light on these organisms. In this study, we estimate the current and future distribution of the introduced jellyfish Blackfordia virginica in the Baltic Sea. We determine the combination of favorable levels of temperature and salinity for this species by analyzing presence/absence data from areas outside the Baltic Sea and project the distribution of suitable habitat in the Baltic Sea across different scenarios with variable climate forcing and eutrophication levels. Our results show that suitability increases with rising temperature and optimal salinity range from 13 to 20 for this species. In addition, a relatively large area of the Baltic Sea represents favorable abiotic conditions for B. virginica, enhancing the concerns on its potential range expansion. Spatial analysis illustrates that the coastal areas of the southern Baltic Sea are particularly at risk for the invasion of the species. The observation of the projection of habitat suitability across time highlights that future Baltic Sea environmental conditions increase suitability levels for B. virginica and suggest a potential expansion of its distribution in the future.

Effective area-based conservation is central in global efforts to reverse marine biodiversity loss and safeguard ecosystem functioning. Here, we identify five key opportunities to maximize conservation potential as nations progress towards the Convention on Biological Diversity’s 2030 area-based management targets. These include enhancing accountability, elevating conservation in spatial planning, implementing adaptive management, coordinating conservation efforts across scales, and reconciling design with expected outcomes. Addressing these collectively will advance global marine conservation and maximize its contributions to biodiversity protection and human society.

Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions cause multiple changes in the ocean and its ecosystems through climate change and ocean acidification. These changes can occur progressively with rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, but there is also the possibility of large-scale abrupt, and/or potentially irreversible changes, which would leave limited opportunity for marine ecosystems to adapt. Such changes, either progressive or abrupt, pose a threat to biodiversity, food security, and human societies. However, it remains notoriously difficult to determine exact limits of a “safe operating space” for humanity. Here, we map, for a variety of ocean impact metrics, the crossing of limits, which we define using the available literature and to represent a wide range of deviations from the unperturbed state. We assess the crossing of these limits in three future emission pathways: two climate mitigation scenarios, including an overshoot scenario, and one high-emission no-mitigation scenario. These scenarios are simulated by the latest generation of Earth system models and large perturbed-parameter ensembles with two Earth system models of intermediate complexity. Using this comprehensive model database, we estimate the timing and warming level at which 15 different impact metrics exceed 4 limits, along with an assessment of the associated uncertainties. We find that under the high-emissions scenario, the strongest severity of impacts is expected with high probability for marine heatwaves’ duration, loss of Arctic summer sea ice extent, expansion of ocean areas that are undersaturated with respect to aragonite, and decrease in plankton biomass. The probability of exceeding a given limit generally decreases clearly under low-emissions scenario. Yet, exceedance of ambitious limits related to steric sea level rise, Arctic summer sea ice extent, Arctic aragonite undersaturation, and plankton biomass are projected to be difficult to avoid (high probability) even under the low-emissions scenario. Compared to the high-emissions scenario, the scenario including a temporary overshoot reduces with high probability the risk of exceeding limits by year 2100 related to marine heatwave duration, Arctic summer sea ice extent, strength of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, aragonite undersaturation, global deoxygenation, plankton biomass, and metabolic index. Our study highlights the urgent need for ambitious mitigation efforts to drastically minimize extensive impacts and potentially irreversible changes to the world’s ocean ecosystems.

Marine ecosystems are increasingly reshaped by climate change and human activities, resulting in novelty in species assemblages that have shifted beyond historical baselines. One unresolved question is how novelty influences resilience. Here, we examine how novelty arises in ecosystems when they transition through phases and affects resilience using the adaptive cycle framework. We use results from an ecosystem model of the Finnish Archipelago Sea (Baltic Sea) under contrasting climate, nutrient load and fishing scenarios. We quantify novelty in species composition and biomass and use ecological network analysis indices to identify adaptive cycle phases and resilience. Results suggest resilience decreases with higher novelty under warmer climate scenarios. Low nutrient load scenarios facilitate faster adaptive cycles and greater resilience than high nutrient load scenarios under the same climate conditions. Connecting network indices to the adaptive cycle helps to understand how the growing human-induced novelty influences resilience, supporting core resilience theory.

One Health, Planetary Health, and EcoHealth – there are myriad conceptual frameworks for expanding discussions to move beyond human, animal and plant health, to be inclusive for the health of ecosystems. At present, however, despite its crucial role in the survival of our world, the ocean receives insufficient consideration within these frameworks. Therefore, greater emphasis should be placed on what can be coined One Ocean Health. To this end, we relate the health of the ocean to currently dominant connotations of the concept of health and acknowledge the ocean’s nature as one gigantic, interconnected ecosystem; a common, irreplaceable ocean on which all living things depend, human and non-human, terrestrial and aquatic alike. Recognizing the interconnectedness of ocean and society, and drawing on concepts from medical theory, we advocate for a holistic, co-developed approach to ocean health that integrates not only scientific and policy perspectives but also acknowledges the cultural diversity in the ways in which people relate to the ocean and engage with it. To achieve this, objective and subjective perspectives of what constitutes “diseases” in marine ecosystems need to be considered, while also defining means and normative goals of a “healthy ocean” – always bearing in mind the fact that this is not an end in itself, but remains crucial for the preservation of the planet that we as humans need.

Fisheries worldwide face uncertain futures as climate change manifests in environmental effects of hitherto unseen strengths. Developing climate-ready management strategies traditionally requires a good mechanistic understanding of stock response to climate change in order to build projection models for testing different exploitation levels. Unfortunately, model-based projections of fish stocks are severely limited by large uncertainties in the recruitment process, as the required stock-recruitment relationship is usually not well represented by data. An alternative is to shift focus to improving the decision-making process, as postulated by the decision-making under deep uncertainty (DMDU) framework. Robust Decision Making (RDM), a key DMDU concept, aims at identifying management decisions that are robust to a vast range of uncertain scenarios. Here we employ RDM to investigate the capability of North Sea cod to support a sustainable and economically viable fishery under future climate change. We projected the stock under 40,000 combinations of exploitation levels, emission scenarios and stock-recruitment parameterizations and found that model uncertainties and exploitation have similar importance for model outcomes. Our study revealed that no management strategy exists that is fully robust to the uncertainty in relation to model parameterization and future climate change. We instead propose a risk assessment that accounts for the trade-offs between stock conservation and profitability under deep uncertainty.

Environmental changes reshape biological communities, inducing cascading effects throughout the food webs. These changes pressure species either to adapt or to track favorable habitats. Estuaries represent an interesting case study to investigate such responses as species will rapidly reach physical boundaries if they cannot adapt fast enough and need to track suitable conditions. One such estuary is the Baltic Sea, characterized by a salinity and temperature gradient that shapes species distribution and imposes physiological stress on organisms. The Baltic Sea is projected to be affected by substantial modifications in environmental conditions by the end of the 21st century, which could have major consequences for species distribution and community composition. However, despite the impending changes and their potential impact, there is a gap in understanding the potential consequences on pelagic species of the Baltic Sea. This study employs long-term observations of primary zooplankton species in the pelagic food web to model changes in their distribution under future climate projections. We found that the parameters having the largest influence on habitat suitability varied across species, although maximal temperature was the most important for six out of seven species. In addition, there was a shrinkage of suitable area for several key species driven by a decrease in salinity and a rise in water temperature. We discuss the complex interplay between environmental changes and the spatial distribution of pelagic species in the Baltic Sea, highlighting the need for proactive management strategies to mitigate potential ecological impacts in the face of future climate scenarios.