What Is the Atlantic Action Plan 2.0?

• August 19, 2026

The Atlantic Action Plan 2.0 is the European Commission’s revamped maritime strategy for the EU Atlantic area, adopted on 23 July 2020 to unlock the potential of the sustainable blue economy while preserving marine ecosystems and supporting climate adaptation. It covers four Member States bordering the Atlantic, Spain, France, Ireland, and Portugal, and builds on an earlier action plan first adopted in 2013. The 2020 update was designed to align the original strategy with two new priorities that hadn’t existed a decade earlier: the European Green Deal and economic recovery from the pandemic crisis.atlantic-maritime-strategy.

Why the Plan Needed an Update

The original 2013 Atlantic strategy focused mainly on growth and job creation in coastal regions, but by 2020 the EU needed something that tied ocean-based economic activity directly to environmental protection. The former European Commissioner for Environment, Oceans and Fisheries summed up the shift in one memorable line, saying the plan must “put green in the blue and blue in the green”. In practice, this meant every action funded under the plan now had to serve a dual purpose, generating economic value for coastal communities while actively reducing pollution, cutting emissions, or restoring habitats at the same time.

One Analogy: Four Legs of the Same Table

Think of the Atlantic Action Plan 2.0 like a table standing on four legs. Remove any single leg, ports, skills, energy, or coastal resilience, and the whole structure becomes unstable, because each pillar depends on the others to hold real weight. A thriving port sector needs skilled workers to operate it, clean marine energy needs resilient coastlines to build on, and none of it functions long-term if pollution and climate change are left unaddressed. The plan was deliberately built with four interlocking pillars rather than one single priority, precisely because a maritime economy this complex cannot stand on just one leg.

The Four Pillars in Practice

Pillar I positions ports as gateways and hubs for the blue economy, focused on strengthening Atlantic ports both as trade gateways and as catalysts for new business activity. Pillar II, blue skills of the future and ocean literacy, set concrete targets like creating 25 Atlantic blue schools by 2025 and launching an Atlantic ocean literacy pilot curriculum. Pillar III promotes marine renewable energy specifically to advance carbon neutrality, pushing investment beyond offshore wind into other forms of ocean-based clean power. Pillar IV, healthy ocean and resilient coasts, covers everything from coastal storm-alert systems to fishing-for-litter initiatives that encourage fishers to bring collected marine waste back to shore.

Underpinning all four pillars is a strong research dimension tied to the Galway and Belém Statements and the All-Atlantic Ocean Research Alliance, which extends the plan’s reach internationally to include the United States, Canada, Brazil, and South Africa. That international research alliance ensures the plan isn’t just an EU-internal exercise, but part of a wider transatlantic effort to understand how the Atlantic Ocean is changing and to develop shared solutions.

Funding the Atlantic Action Plan 2.0

The Atlantic Action Plan 2.0 does not operate through a single dedicated fund, instead pulling resources from multiple existing EU financial instruments. Primary funding comes from European Structural and Investment Funds, alongside the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund, with additional support available through Horizon Europe, the Connecting Europe Facility, the LIFE programme, and innovative financial tools like InvestEU. That multi-source funding model reflects the plan’s cross-cutting nature, since a single ports project, for instance, might simultaneously qualify for regional development money and marine research funding.

PHAROS and the Atlantic Action Plan Connection

PHAROS explicitly builds its education and community engagement work around the goals of Atlantic Action Plan 2.0, particularly Pillar II’s focus on blue skills and ocean literacy. Open-schooling projects run through PHAROS Living Labs, where families, local experts, and stakeholders collaborate directly with teachers and students on real coastal challenges, are framed by the project as a direct contribution to unlocking the Atlantic blue economy’s potential while protecting marine ecosystems. This same alignment runs through PHAROS’s broader stakeholder engagement strategy, where raising public awareness of sustainable ocean use is treated not as a side activity but as groundwork the entire blue economy depends on. By anchoring its Living Labs and Blue Schools work to an already-established EU framework, PHAROS ensures its results feed into a policy structure that will continue well beyond the project’s own lifetime.