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Southern North Sea Use Case

The current crises, including climate change, the difficulty of food production and the loss of cheap energy sources, require a rethink and innovation in the production of energy and food. The UN Ocean Decade is focusing on the ocean, which has become a key area of focus for climate-friendly economic activities, in part due to the EU Green Deal. The scale of the planned projects necessitates increasingly sophisticated digital forward planning, known as digital twins. The HEREON research centre is a leading authority in coastal and climate research, specialising in the development of models and digital twins. HEREON is developing, testing and evaluating a digital twin for combined energy and food production in the North Sea as part of the EU Horizon Project SEADOTs. To this end, bespoke model routines are being developed that calculate the physical and biogeochemical dynamics of food production through aquaculture in offshore wind farms over long periods of time to the nearest metre and minute. The overarching goal of SEADOTs is to provide stakeholders and the public with a tool that predicts the planning and calculation of the consequences of combined energy and food production in a specific pilot case.