A Sustainability Index of potential co-location of offshore wind farms and open water aquaculture

• We introduced a co-location index of aquaculture plans and offshore wind farms.
• Remote sensing data were converted in standardized sustainability scores.
• The index was obtained as the geometric mean of all the environmental indexes.
• The index was tested for a real case study.

This paper presents the definition of a Sustainability Index for the co-location in marine areas of offshore wind farms and aquaculture plans. The development of the index is focused on the application of MCE technique based on physical constraints and biological parameters that are directly linked to the primary production. The relevant physical factors considered are wind velocity and depth range (which directly governs the choice of the site for energy production and for offshore technology), the relevant biological parameters are SST, SST anomaly and CHL-a concentration (as a measurement of the productivity). The further development of the technique, already used in open water aquaculture localization, consists in converting raw data into sustainability scores, which have been combined using additive models, in order to define the overall sustainability. The study area used to implement the computation of the Sustainability Index (SI) was identified in the Danish portion of the Baltic Sea and in the western part of the Danish North Sea. Results on the spatial distribution of the SI underline different responses as a function of the physical and biological main influencing parameters.