Bringing marine ecosystems into policies for sustainable development requires better information on the causal connections between human pressures and the changing state of the systems. This is particularly important at a time when the European Community is expanding, re-examining its agricultural and chemical policies, implementing a new fisheries policy and exploring new ways to protect marine systems. ELME will enhance understanding of causality, forecast the impacts of divergent development scenarios and inform evolving Community policies.
Current interdisciplinary knowledge linking lifestyles with their marine environmental consequences is widely dispersed. ELME brings together a necessarily large consortium, covering all relevant disciplines and regions. It integrates existing knowledge of environmental state changes, sectoral pressures and social and economic drivers using a common conceptual model. It will select contextual indicators for each causal level and model the relationships between them. These models will be applied to plausible development scenarios with particular focus on the accession process, to explore possible consequences for the stated four marine ecosystems. Results will be diffused to all relevant stakeholders.

Through improved understanding of the relationship between European lifestyles and the state of marine ecosystems, ELME will model the consequences of alternative scenarios for human development in post-accession Europe on the marine environment.
ELME is designed to provide the best available scientific information for predicting the likely impacts of major economic, social and institutional changes within Europe on marine ecosystems. The health of marine ecosystems represents an ‘end indicator’ of human environmental impacts and of our ability to achieve sustainable development.
Achievement of the overall objective requires a highly multidisciplinary approach integrating relevant information on:
the current major state changes affecting Europe’s marine ecosystems in four major sea areas;
the pressures (anthropogenic and from natural variability) on the environment producing these state changes;
the underlying social and economic drivers that lead to these pressures;
the plausible scenarios for social and economic change across Europe during the next two decades.
The interrelationship between these factors, the social and economic impacts of state change and effective policy responses have been summarised in the conceptual Drivers-Pressures-State-Impacts-Response (DPSIR) model, first employed for policy analysis by the OECD. ELME will examine the current DPS relationships and then use this information to model the consequences of plausible macroeconomic and major policy options in the expanded European Union.
ELME does not set out to examine detailed cause/effect relationships at a local level, though the research may establish a mechanism and expertise for more detailed and complex subsequent research. The necessarily broad overall objective of ELME is one of its most important features but also constitutes a major challenge for multidisciplinary science. The present proposal brings together a large number of institutions that each offers a unique piece of the research ‘jig-saw puzzle’ that must be completed.