REGENERATIVE OCEAN FARMING IN THE BALTIC SEA REGION - REGIONAL FLAGSHIPS PROJECTS SUPPORTING SUSTAINABLE BLUE ECONOMY IN EU SEA BASINS
COOL BLUE BALTIC: Community Ocean Farms and Local Business Clusters in the Baltic Sea
Funded by the European Union under Grant Agreement ID 101124475. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
The COOL BLUE BALTIC project is a EMFAF flagship project under Grant Agreement ID 101124475 (EMFAF-2023-PIA-FLAGSHIP).
The overall objective is to reorient fishers from extraction to ocean regeneration activities.
With 11 partners from each Baltic Member State, the project will assess technical, economic, environmental and social requirements to establish regenerative aquaculture in the Baltic Sea.
Partners
- SUBMARINER Network for Blue Growth EEIG (DE) - Coordinator
- Havhøst (DK)
- University of Gothenburg (SE)
- Aktion Österbotten (FI)
- EUCC-D Küstenunion Deutschlands (DE)
- Gdynia Maritime University (PL)
- Klaipeda Science & Technology Park (LT)
- Latvian Institute for Aquatic Ecology (LV)
- Universit of Tartu (EE)
- Simrishamn Kommun (SE)
- ECOPELAG (SE)
Results
The 6 COOL BLUE BALTIC innovations
1 - a Baltic-wide common licensing framework to improve access to marine space
The project partners mapped out the requirements for licensing in each Baltic country. They also made a lesson on licensing and an expression of interest form to get an idea of how many people are interested in setting up a regenerative ocean farm.
2 - a (crowd)funding mechanism to (co-)finance future ROF initiatives
The project included an assessment of the best way to fund your farm. This resulted in a report and a crowdfunding page. With this, the partners hope to raise funds for community-led projects to give them a leg-up on their regenerative journey.
3 - a multi-annual event to raise awareness and social acceptance of ROF
The COOL BLUE BALTIC partners encourage all regenerative ocean farmers to meet at least once a year at a relevant event. The first of these was the 2nd EU Algae Awareness Summit in Berlin, October 2025. The next will be the COOL BLUE sister project's final event, together with BalticMUPPETS in Kiel, March 2026.
4 - a data-sharing network to exchange and consolidate monitoring efforts of ROFs
The project produced a lesson on monitoring your farm, as well as a form to submit a dataset on coolbluefuture.org, to build a picture of what data is out there, and how to align it in the future to measure regeneration across Europe.
5 - an online training platform (coolbluefuture.org) for incipient ocean farmers to learn the basic concepts of ROF
The coolbluefuture.org website is one of the key outputs of both the COOL BLUE BALTIC and COOL BLUE projects, serving as an online training platform and information hub for budding sea farmers, including a lesson on business models.
6 - a vocational training programme to bring local stakeholders and authorities into closer collaboration and enforce regulation of MPAs in a community-led local development (CLLD) approach.
The project also resulted in the design of a vocational training programme (originally called an MPA stewardship programme) to train up new recruits in regenerative ocean farming, while contributing to MPA management through tasks such as monitoring and enforcement.