North C Neutral

Governments and businesses are looking to our seas and oceans as a resource for addressing a broad array of societal challenges such as low-carbon energy generation, sustainable food production, new economic development, ecological restoration and ecological creation. 

Understanding what activities and infrastructures should go where in our oceans so as to maximise benefits and minimise costs and environmental harm is a highly complex problem. 

It requires understanding not just isolated costs and benefits of various options, but scales of economy (wind park size), locations of critical infrastructure (substations and cabling), contextual benefits or drawbacks of collocating technologies, ecological impacts and other stakeholder concerns such as obstruction of views.

Our web-based decision support tool - North C Neutral (NCN) - allows stakeholders to rigorously yet rapidly investigate and understand the nuanced trade-offs and complexities outlined above and that are inherent in all spatial planning. 

Ultimately, stakeholders can choose how to utilize our tool and its KPIs. They can assess current conditions or input a pre-designed marine-use plan, weighing their pros and cons. They can define a set of goals, constraints and assumptions, and let the tool identify the optimal configuration for those conditions.

Additionally, stakeholders can request a sensitivity analysis to determine which areas are most consistently optimal for specific technologies or uses, or identify areas likely to have competing demands from activities under current or projected future conditions.