What is COME3T about?
It is a scientific mediation project on the environmental issues related to the development of offshore renewable energies. The aim is to provide stakeholders and the general public with access to the knowledge of scientific experts on various offshore renewable energy-related environmental issues, such as the effects generated by noise emissions or the introduction of anthropogenic structures in the marine environment. For the 2023-2024 cycle of the project, we also intend to include the socio-economic issues raised by the development of offshore wind farms, such as maritime spatial planning and the reconciliation of different demands on the maritime space.
How are the topics selected and what role do you play in the project?
A steering committee, composed of a broad range of public and private stakeholders involved in the offshore renewable energy sector, propose priority issues to be addressed. Most of these relate to questions raised by civil society. A call for experts is then organised to bring together neutral and independent scientists who are specialists in the subject. This is one of the linchpins of the project. Within this context, I organise the different project phases, coordinate the steering committee, liaise between the various stakeholders and facilitate the expert committee workshops in order to identify and summarise the scientific content to be disseminated.
How is this work presented?
We disseminate the experts’ knowledge in bulletins, around fifteen pages long, that explain the subject and provide information to answer the questions raised, based on the current state of knowledge. Some subjects are difficult to summarise and explain to non-experts in a few pages without distorting the scientific message. The difficulty lies in bridging the gap between highly specialised scientific expertise and the steering committee’s expectations in terms of popularisation. The richly illustrated bulletins are scientific mediation documents based on which we produce short videos aimed at a wider audience with less awareness of offshore renwable energy-related environmental issues.