Annex IV - Investigating Environmental Effects of Wave and Tidal Devices Through International Cooperation

The pace of development for marine energy projects worldwide continues to be hindered by uncertainty surrounding potential environmental effects of wave and tidal devices and the balance of system. In response to this continued uncertainty, member nations of the Ocean Energy Systems (OES) developed a collaborative project – Annex IV – to increase collection and sharing of knowledge, research collaborations around high priority environmental interactions, and relevancy of the information to permitting (consenting) processes. The culmination of Annex IV Phase 1 is a searchable database of current literature and reports on environmental effects of marine energy development, and an analysis of three key interactions of devices and the marine environment.