In the era of blue growth, ocean multi-use is gaining popularity for its potential environmental, economic and societal synergies. Expectations are high for multi-use applications to alleviate marine spatial allocation conflicts amongst users of the sea, and to stimulate innovative ways of sustainably exploiting marine resources. However, a potential barrier to implementing multi-use and co-location is the lack of a well-defined framework to evaluate the impacts of ocean multi-use projects. This paper introduces the Ocean Multi-Use Assessment Framework (OMAF), which builds upon traditional environmental impact assessments but expands to include societal and economic dimensions. In addition to these three pillars of sustainable development, the framework incorporates two critical conditions: technological feasibility and regulatory appropriateness (legal, policy, and governance). The framework promotes the use of scenarios to compare single-use and multi-use approaches in an integrated manner. This approach allows for a comprehensive, holistic evaluation of multi-use projects compared to single-use alternatives, supporting decision-making. Strong stakeholder engagement throughout the process is emphasized. The OMAF has been developed and tested under the EU-funded Horizon 2020 UNITED project, where it was applied to five multi-use pilot projects. Despite challenges related to data availability for emerging marine activities, the framework has proven applicable and effective for most projects.

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The relationship between human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) infections and accelerated immune senescence is controversial. Whereas some studies reported a CMV-associated impaired capacity to control heterologous infections at old age, other studies could not confirm this. We hypothesized that these discrepancies might relate to the variability in the infectious dose of CMV occurring in real life. Here, we investigated the influence of persistent CMV infection on immune perturbations and specifically addressed the role of the infectious dose on the contribution of CMV to accelerated immune senescence. We show in experimental mouse models that the degree of mouse CMV (MCMV)-specific memory CD8+ T cell accumulation and the phenotypic T cell profile are directly influenced by the infectious dose, and data on HCMV-specific T cells indicate a similar connection. Detailed cluster analysis of the memory CD8+ T cell development showed that high-dose infection causes a differentiation pathway that progresses faster throughout the life span of the host, suggesting a virus–host balance that is influenced by aging and infectious dose. Importantly, short-term MCMV infection in adult mice is not disadvantageous for heterologous superinfection with lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV). However, following long-term CMV infection the strength of the CD8+ T cell immunity to LCMV superinfection was affected by the initial CMV infectious dose, wherein a high infectious dose was found to be a prerequisite for impaired heterologous immunity. Altogether our results underscore the importance of stratification based on the size and differentiation of the CMV-specific memory T cell pools for the impact on immune senescence, and indicate that reduction of the latent/lytic viral load can be beneficial to diminish CMV-associated immune senescence. @en