Dear Colleagues, We would like to invite you to participate in a workshop on ‘Marine Renewable Energy - Current research and evidence gaps on impact on Marine Mammals’ to be held on Friday 6th April 2018 ahead of the European Cetacean Society Conference in La Spezia, Italy. The workshop will start at 9am and finish by 5pm. There is a participation fee of €25, to be paid on the day. The workshop is being organised by members of the UK statutory nature conservation bodies (Natural England, Scottish Natural Heritage, Natural Resources Wales and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee) who act as advisors to the UK government. The aim of the workshop is to share knowledge on current and developing research and evidence gaps on the impacts of marine renewable energy development on marine mammals across Europe. Summary: The impacts of marine renewable energy (MRE) developments such as offshore wind and tidal energy are potentially of conservation concern for marine mammal populations. Research on impacts, monitoring and mitigation is being undertaken across various EU countries, but often information on current work is not easily shared and risks duplication of effort. This workshop seeks to gather together researchers, regulators, developers and nature conservation agencies from around Europe to discuss the research work that is ongoing and planned in each country. This will include long-term strategic programmes of work, sectoral studies and renewable development site specific research. The workshop agenda will include case studies on current and developing research, an item exploring how countries are aligning their strategic and industry funded research and monitoring, whether more cross sectoral projects would be useful and a discussion on current evidence gaps. These discussions will allow the workshop participants to share their current and planned work, explore whether work is being duplicated and identify potential cross-border and cross sector collaborations that could take place to gain as much data and knowledge as possible from the work being undertaken. The workshop will identify a list of current research and evidence gaps to be shared publicly via workshop proceedings, which will then be a useful resource to help identify where to target future work. It will also be a useful forum for the sharing of ideas and building a network of regulators, conservation advisors and researchers working on similar issues across the MRE sector. Please contact Rebecca Walker: rebecca.walker2@naturalengland.org.uk<mailto:rebecca.walker2@naturalengland.org.uk> to register your place at this workshop. We look forward to seeing you in La Spezia! Rebecca Walker (on behalf of the organising committee) Natural England UK www.gov.uk/natural-england<http://www.gov.uk/natural-england> This email and any attachments is intended for the named recipient only. If you have received it in error you have no authority to use, disclose, store or copy any of its contents and you should destroy it and inform the sender. Whilst this email and associated attachments will have been checked for known viruses whilst within the Natural England systems, we can accept no responsibility once it has left our systems. Communications on Natural England systems may be monitored and/or recorded to secure the effective operation of the system and for other lawful purposes.