Summary
This report is a review of available data and information sources for climate proofing the tool Symphony as a part of Work Package 1 (WP1) in the Formas project ClimeMarine - Integration of climate-change impacts into the ecosystem-based management and planning of the Swedish marine environment. The aim of ClimeMarine is to climate proof planning and management of the Swedish marine resources by using and further developing the tool Symphony, the cumulative assessment tool developed for the Swedish Marine Spatial Planning. ClimeMarine is a cooperation project between the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI), Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management (SwAM), University of Gothenburg (GU), and Geological Survey of Sweden (SGU), all involved in marine science, management, and planning.
In this report, we give a short description of Symphony as well as its underlying assumptions. These assumptions are explicitly selected to make the tool sufficiently simple for transparent interpretations. We also summarize the latest climate and nutrient load projections for the Baltic Sea that are incorporated into Symphony and elucidate the uncertainties in these climate projections. In addition, we investigate the potential to include connectivity and changing habitat distributions into Symphony, which are important aspects for Swedish Marine Spatial Planning and for understanding climate change impacts. Habitat change modelling is a complementary method, which can lead to improvements of the Symphony datasets. We describe possible ways to study habitat vulnerability and the impact from climate change, utilizing the same climate projections as implemented into Symphony. The results will lead to further understanding of climate change impacts on the interactions between human-induced pressures on habitats and ecosystem and analyses how the knowledge can be included in the Marine Spatial Planning.