Beyond Stationarity: The Faro Framework for Quantifying Adaptive Operational Risk in Marine Spatial Planning

Marine Spatial Planning (MSP), the prevailing global governance paradigm for sustaina-ble ocean development, confronts the critical challenge of integrating climatic uncertainty into its core processes. Reliance on the stationarity assumption compromises risk assess-ments for long-lifecycle assets within the Blue Economy, thereby impeding progress to-ward principal sustainability objectives. This article introduces and validates FARO (Framework for Adaptive Operational Risk Analysis), a methodological framework de-signed to operationalize the transition toward climate-smart MSP. The framework's core innovation lies in furnishing a scalable quantitative structure that directly links high-resolution climatological projections with operational decision-making and capital planning, thereby converting climatic uncertainty into actionable operational risk indica-tors. Its applicability is demonstrated via a case study of Brazil's emergent offshore wind industry (Southeastern Marine Region), analyzing impacts under the RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 scenarios. The findings quantify the critical role of technological resilience as a key adap-tation variable, revealing a potential reduction in operational downtime from approxi-mately 60% to 10% by enhancing operational capacity from Standard (SWH 2.0m) to Flexible (SWH 2.5m). In conclusion, FARO proves to be a robust decision-support instru-ment, effectively bridging state-of-the-art regional climate science with participatory plan-ning to foster genuinely sustainable and resilient maritime development.