The Fisheries and Marine Renewable Energy Working Group: creating an agenda for improved co-existence.

Introduction As an emerging industry, Marine Renewable Energy (MRE) is expected to play a major contributory role if the UK is to successfully reach its desired target of renewable energy production by 2020 (DECC, 2011). However, due to the competing objectives and priorities of MRE and other industries, for example fisheries, and in the delivering of conservation measures, the demand for space within our marine landscape is increasing, and interactions are inevitable. In this research we investigate the challenges in resolving interactions between fisheries and marine renewable energy. We focus on the improved co-existence between the two sectors and developing a mitigation agenda for fishing effort displacement in the UK. This research was carried out as part of the work of the Fisheries and Marine Renewable Energy Working Group (FMREWG) and funded by the Marine Renewable Energy Knowledge Exchange Programme (MREKEP), a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) project and co-ordinated by Plymouth University. Methods The first method included a scoping survey questionnaire conducted at the Environmental Interactions of Marine Renewable Energy (EIMR) in Orkney May 2012. Participants responses to questions were given a data needs score based on their ranking of importance of certain issues presented, resulting in priority areas and research gaps being identified. A Scoping workshop followed (Rodwell et al., 2012) and data was coded according to an inductive process in order to identify key themes and challenges. Individuals were selected for the final expert workshop, held in York in April 2013 (Rodwell et al., 2013). Data from this workshop was coded according to a deductive process, as themes had already been identified from the initial workshop. This provided further insight into the existing codes and contributed to the practical components of the mitigation agenda. Both workshops were based on the Delphimethod and in order to enable discussion participants from different backgrounds and regions were divided into groups.