Report of the Working Group on Integrated Assessments of the North Sea (WGINOSE)

This year's meeting was held back-to-back with the “ICES/HELCOM Working Group on Integrated Assessments of the Baltic Sea (WGIAB)” in order to facilitate exchange among Integrated Ecosystem Assessment (IEA) WGs within the SCICOM Steering Group on the Regional Seas Programme (SSGRSP) and to find common ground in relation to operationalization of integrated assessments. The meeting was character-ised by intensive discussions and presentations of approaches and tools to operation-alize IEAs. One main conclusion from the WGINOSE-meeting is that the level of coordination required to routinely run fully operational IEA cycles would need a completely new governance structure where the decision making body has full con-trol of all the resources working on science underpinning fisheries and marine envi-ronmental management. As implementation of a new governance structure is highly unlikely over the next decade, focus of IEA working groups over the next years should be on the development of IEA tools that would fit to advise the management systems as to be implemented in the revised CFP and the MSFD rather than working towards implementation of IEA cycles of e.g. of the Levin et al. (2009) type.