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.
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.
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.
Around 70% of our planet is covered by water. Just as human activities on land require planning, planning is also needed at sea. How can the space at sea be allocated to activities for use and protection in a space-saving way? How can we think across the different sectors so that marine planning is more coherent? These are questions that I am working to answer in my Ph.D. at Aalborg University, Copenhagen.
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.