With growing pressures on marine ecosystems and on marine space, an increasingly needed strategy to optimize the use of marine space is to co-locate synergic marine human uses in close spatial–temporal proximity while separating conflicting marine human uses. The ArcMap toolbox SEANERGY is a new, cross-sectoral spatial decision support tool (DST) that enables maritime spatial planners to consider synergies and conflicts between marine uses to support assessments of co-location options. Cross-sectoral approaches are important to reach more
integrative maritime spatial planning (MSP) processes. As this article demonstrates through a Baltic Sea analysis, SEANERGY presents a crosssectoral use catalog for MSP through enabling the tool users to answer important specific questions to spatially and/or numerically
weight potential synergies/conflicts between marine uses. The article discusses to what degree such a cross-sectoral perspective can support integrative MSP processes. While MSP integrative challenges still exist, SEANERGY enables MSP processes to move towards developing shared goals and initiate discussions built on best available knowledge regarding potential use-use synergies and use-use conflicts for whole sea basins at once.
This article examines whether the concept of territorial governance (TG) accurately captures the nature of governance and policymaking in transboundary marine spatial planning (TMSP) activities in the Baltic Sea Region. The focus of analysis is on the DG Mare–funded Baltic SCOPE and Pan Baltic Scope projects, which brought together key marine spatial planning stakeholders in the Baltic Sea Region to find solutions to TMSP issues. The five key dimensions of TG are examined against the transboundary collaborations undertaken during these two projects. The article finds that TMSP in the Baltic Sea Region shares many of the key characteristics of TG, such as, promoting learning and establishing stronger links between institutions, sectors and stakeholders; however, the TG concept fails to accurately capture the power dynamics at play in TMSP, particularly the central role of national planning authorities and certain sea use sectors in determining the overall direction of policy.
In the European Union, Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) has been regarded as a means of promoting the sustainable growth of the blue economy. Consequently, where the planning outcomes affect the business operations in marine areas, commercial and industry stakeholders should have an important role in the planning process. However, the business perspective in MSP has gained little attention in stakeholder involvement literature. The aim of this study is to elaborate on the business sector's interest and involvement in MSP in the Baltic Sea region. The findings are based on the first-hand experiences of MSP authorities and experts. Furthermore, perspectives from two sea-use sectors, maritime transport and marine tourism, have been investigated using online questionnaires to discover their views. The study focuses on the questions of who to involve and what are the driving forces promoting business sector involvement. Even though MSP is a form of broad-scale planning, the results indicate that all spatial and organizational scales from local to international and from small enterprises to umbrella organizations should be considered when designing approaches to business stakeholder participation. The planning authorities need to consider what are the benefits and challenges of involving different types of business stakeholders. Planners often rely on organizations that represent business stakeholders and individual companies. It is resource effective to interact with representatives as they are considered to have a broad and general knowledge of the respective sector's interests. However, in some cases it is beneficial to also integrate individual companies, especially in local or regional contexts.
The report is organized as follows. The introduction will lay out the current state-of-play of eco-efficiency and the zeitgeist of the current situation on maritime that we find ourselves in, in 2020. The next section will provide some historical context looking back to 2010 and 2000 to trace the trajectory and developmental course on which we are. The core contribution of this report is the Maritime Operations Roadmap that can be found in Figure 1 on page 9. This illustration plots the expectations for technological capabilities and policy from 2020 to 2030.
The report is organized as follows. The introduction will lay out the current state-of-play of eco-efficiency and the zeitgeist of the current situation on maritime that we find ourselves in, in 2020. The next section will provide some historical context looking back to 2010 and 2000 to trace the trajectory and developmental course that we are on. The core contribution of this report is the Shipyard 4.0 Roadmap, that can be found in Figure 1 on page 9. This illustration plots the expectations for technological capabilities and policy from 2020 to 2030. The descriptions of the elements of the roadmap are provided in Appendix 1.
With expanding human uses at sea, the objective of maritime spatial planning (MSP) to promote sustainable coexistence between marine uses becomes an increasingly challenging task. In order to assess coexistence options, both use-use interactions and use-environment interactions are important to explore. Tools for doing cumulative impact assessments (CIA) on the environment provide a means for spatially exploring environmental impacts. Finding inspiration in such ecosystem-based spatial use-environment approaches while drawing on pairwise marine use compatibility knowledge from existing literature, a spatial approach to model potential synergies and conflicts between marine uses through an expert-based scoring system is presented and implemented in SEANERGY, an ArcMap-based opensource toolbox. A test based on Baltic Sea GIS data demonstrates how SEANERGY supplements CIA analyzes with knowledge about potential use-use synergies, potential use-use conflicts, and their spatial extents, useful for optimizing the use of marine space in MSP without putting too much cumulative pressure on the environment.
Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) requires the analysis of the spatial distribution of marine uses and environmental conditions. Such analyzes can be carried out with GIS, but standard GIS programs do not feature a toolbox that combines the most needed functionalities for such analyses. The SPACEA toolbox presented here was created to bundle and adapt existing functionalities in one toolbox. SPACEA consists of several script tools that have been designed to be user-friendly and applicable to different analyzes for MSP. This includes the processing of different input layers with regard to marine uses and environmental conditions. The main functionalities of SPACEA are exemplified in a fictional case study in the Baltic Sea, where the tools are applied to find potentially suitable areas for mussel farming. The tools feature a user-friendly interface and more experienced users may also use the provided sample codes to run it from the python window or as a stand-alone script. As such, the tools can be applied by users with different levels of GIS knowledge and experience.
Across Europe, countries are joining forces in order to implement European Commission initiatives as the Blue Growth Strategy and the Directive on Maritime Spatial Planning. Collaboration on how to perform stakeholder involvement as well as create cross-border solutions has become a key issue around the European sea basins and holistic spatial planning approaches similar to terrestrial planning practices are now being implemented in the marine environment. Among the sectors in marine governance is the maritime cultural heritage under water as well as in the coastal zone, where the example of the Baltic Sea Region illustrates how this sector has become an inherent part of the new Blue Growth discourse and the MSP-policy development across the region. In order to utilise this potential, support for collaboration and shared understandings within the maritime cultural heritage community of practise is needed. This research has focused on how to develop a spatially enabled digital and collaborative working environment to support the co-creation of new shared spatial planning concepts for maritime cultural heritage. The development of the platform itself has been carried out in a close cooperation with the actual users including cultural heritage experts, public authorities and research institutes in the Baltic Sea Region.
The activities and emissions from leisure boats in the Baltic Sea have been modeled in a comprehensive approach for the first time, using a new simulation model leisure Boat Emissions and Activities siMulator (BEAM). The model utilizes survey data to characterize the national leisure boat fleets. Leisure boats have been categorized based on their size, use and engine specifications, and for these subcategories emission factors for NOx, PM2.5, CO, non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOCs), and releases of copper (Cu) and zinc (Zn) from antifouling paints have been estimated according to literature values. The modeling approach also considers the temporal and spatial distribution of leisure boat activities, which are applied to each simulated leisure boat separately. According to our results the CO and NMVOC emissions from leisure boats, as well as Cu and Zn released from antifouling paints, are significant when compared against the emissions originating from registered commercial shipping in the Baltic Sea. CO emissions equal 70 % of the registered shipping emissions and NMVOC emissions equal 160 % when compared against the modeled results in the Baltic Sea in 2014. Modeled NOx and PM2.5 from the leisure boats are less significant compared to the registered shipping emissions. The emissions from leisure boats are concentrated in the summer months of June, July and August and are released in the vicinity of inhabited coastal areas. Given the large emission estimates for leisure boats, this commonly overlooked source of emissions should be further investigated in greater detail.
With expanding human uses at sea, the objective of maritime spatial planning (MSP) to promote sustainable coexistence between marine uses becomes an increasingly challenging task. In order to assess coexistence options, both use-use interactions and use-environment interactions are important to explore. Tools for doing cumulative impact assessments (CIA) on the environment provide a means for spatially exploring environmental impacts. Finding inspiration in such ecosystem-based spatial use-environment approaches while drawing on pairwise marine use compatibility knowledge from existing literature, a spatial approach to model potential synergies and conflicts between marine uses through an expert-based scoring system is presented and implemented in SEANERGY, an ArcMap-based opensource toolbox. A test based on Baltic Sea GIS data demonstrates how SEANERGY supplements CIA analyzes with knowledge about potential use-use synergies, potential use-use conflicts, and their spatial extents, useful for optimizing the use of marine space in MSP without putting too much cumulative pressure on the environment.