The Mediterranean Sea is heavily used and subject to increasing human pressure: urbanisation, tourism, agriculture, fishing, transport and industry have been pointed out as the major forces of change. Maintaining and developing sustainable human activities in coastal areas depends more and more on the health of marine ecosystems and their capacity to provide food, protect life, maintain water quality and regulate climate. Yet, many marine organisms, such as fish and shellfish, are currently exploited far beyond their regeneration capacity and their habitats are declining in many places. Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), areas set aside to protect marine organisms and their habitats, have the potential to increase the abundance and diversity of marine life inside the protection range, while benefitting at the same time also the surrounding areas through the dispersal of juvenile and adult organisms across their borders.

SAFENET aims to understand how connected networks of MPAs (i.e. in which organisms leaving one MPA can find refuge in another one) can provide both biological and socioeconomic benefits, by pursuing the achievement of a good environmental status (under the Marine Strategy Framework Directive), while, at the same time, guaranteeing the viability of local fisheries. Ecosystem-wide information and economic information will be integrated into a coherent assessment framework to evaluate the performances of alternative management strategies with respect to a range of criteria, each representing the viewpoint of a different fisheries stakeholder.