In 2025, The Crown Estate commissioned JNCC to carry-out an in-depth review the Offshore Wind Environmental Evidence Register (OWEER) which represented the first review of the register since its establishment in 2021. The purpose of the OWGRE review was to understand to what extent evidence gaps listed in the OWEER had been closed by projects funded under the OWEC Programme and a targeted selection of other research programmes, specifically ScotMER, ORJIP, OESEA, and OWEAP. The review also conducted a reprioritisation of all evidence gaps across receptors. This work was commissioned primarily to inform future funding priorities from the remaining OWEC research budget. In addition, JNCC were asked to advise which of the evidence gaps represented immediate, short, and medium to long-term evidence needs based on a publicly available pipeline of offshore wind project target commissioning dates.

The OWGRE project is now complete and two reports are available on the MDE:

Assessment of evidence gap closure in the Offshore Wind Environmental Evidence Register (OWEER) - This report outlines the methods and results of the evidence gap closure assessment.

Recommended Priority Funding Areas For The Offshore Wind Evidence And Change Programme (OWEC) - This report identifies a list of evidence gaps requiring research to meet immediate, short, and medium to long-term evidence needs.

The OWGRE outputs also included recommendations on how to enhance the OWEER in future iterations to build on its content and to enable a more efficient approach to assessing evidence gap closure. These recommendations are currently being considered and TCE are now scoping follow-up work with JNCC to enhance the definition of evidence gaps and the register’s prioritisation approach. Some work has already been delivered to improve the user experience by digitising the register. The digital OWEER tool can be accessed here

OWEC have commissioned some additional work to further refine the evidence priorities identified by the OWGRE reports. This will identify which of the OWGRE prioritised evidence gaps require research solutions that the OWEC Programme is most suited to deliver and will help to shape future OWEC funding decisions. This further refinement process is expected to conclude by the end of 2026.