The Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) Challenge simulation platform helps planners and stakeholders understand and manage the complexity of MSP. In the interactive simulation, different data layers covering an entire sea region can be viewed to make an assessment of the current status. Users can create scenarios for future uses of the marine space over a period of several decades. Changes in energy infrastructure, shipping, and the marine environment are then simulated, and the effects are visualized using indicators and heat maps. The platform is built with advanced game technology and uses aspects of role-play to create interactive sessions; it can thus be referred to as serious gaming. To calculate and visualize the effects of planning decisions on the marine ecology, we integrated the Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) food web modeling approach into the platform. We demonstrate how EwE was connected to MSP, considering the range of constraints imposed by running scientific software in interactive serious gaming sessions while still providing cascading ecological feedback in response to planning actions. We explored the connection by adapting two published ecological models for use in MSP sessions. We conclude with lessons learned and identify future developments of the simulation platform.
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A comprehensive vulnerability assessment is a scientific basis for the realization of the United Nations' sustainable development goals. Energy resilience plays a crucial role in mitigating social vulnerability due to disaster shocks. Often, energy infrastructure and services collapse after disasters. The recent Russia-Ukraine war has exacerbated Europe's energy crisis and social vulnerabilities, making it even more urgent to add energy resilience to vulnerability assessments. This paper takes the Netherlands as the study area for vulnerability assessment, constructs a new social vulnerability indicator (SVI) system supplemented with the energy element, and compares that with the traditional energy indicator system. The results indicate that: 1) The introduction of energy indicators fills the gap of traditional SVI assessment. 2) Energy indicators reveal regional and spatial differences in potential social vulnerability in the Netherlands. 3) Energy-inclusive SVI demonstrates that uneven urbanization exacerbates risks and inequalities for vulnerable groups, with potential impacts on social vulnerability. Sustainable urban development requires the search for a recognized and coordinated approach to managing vulnerability across regions. The complementarity of energy indicators offers opportunities to provide a more comprehensive assessment of spatial patterns of social vulnerability, identify potentially vulnerable areas, enhance urban disaster resilience, and achieve sustainable urban development.
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This paper seeks to highlight underlying issues of the tourism system that have led to tourism extremes of too much or too little tourism. Five phases are recognized that reflect different ways of dealing with too much tourism over time, after which the impact of a sudden lack of tourism is investigated in light of future renewal processes. This discussion highlights the remarkable capacity of the tourism industry to adjust to rapidly changing circumstances and crises, even when these cause anguish to individuals and within societies at large. The paper thus seeks to contextualize the current discussions regarding the transformation of tourism post COVID-19. It highlights the complexity of changing a tourism that multiple stakeholders depend on or have grown accustomed to. To come to a more balanced tourism, it is necessary to not only come up with alternative visions and strategies, but also to engage with the political economy nature of tourism development. A future research agenda should therefore also discuss facets of entangled power, social exclusion, inequalities and class differences to come to new reference points of what actually constitutes a more inclusive tourism success.
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