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.
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.
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.
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.
Marine space is overall under increasing pressures from human activities. Traditionally, the activities taken place in oceans and seas were related to fisheries and transport of goods and people. Today, offshore energy production – oil, gas, and wind, aquaculture, and sea-based tourism are important contributors to the global economy. This creates competition and conflicts between various uses and requires an overall regulation and planning. Maritime activities generate pressures on the marine ecosystems, and in many areas severe impacts can be observed. Maritime spatial planning is seen as an instrument to manage the seas and oceans in a more sustainable way, but information and tools are needed. The current paper describes a tool to assess the cumulative impacts of maritime activities on the marine ecosystems combined with a tool to assess the conflicts and synergies between these activities.
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 space is overall under increasing pressure from human activities and in the way harming the marine ecosystems. Maritime spatial planning is one of the governance elements in the EU Integrated Maritime Policy (2007) that aims to maximize the sustainable use of the seas and oceans. Maritime spatial planning aims to ensure that the increased use of the marine space takes place in a way that is consistent with the sustainable development in the seas and oceans. According to the MSP Directive it is required to follow an ecosystem-based and thus holistic approach. For this to happen, tools are needed, and some tools are available but with various advantages and disadvantages. The aim of the current research has been to develop a comprehensive package of tools to assess the environmental impacts of societal activities under different maritime spatial planning proposals.
The space occupied by traditional and new human-based marine uses at sea is expanding, creating a need for developing methods to assess interactions between co-located uses in maritime spatial planning (MSP). However, no clear terminology for use-use interactions exists. Thus, an analytical framework for spatial decision support tools (DSTs) to assess use-use interactions is deduced from literature. Four spatial-temporal links are found to either alone or together constitute use-use interactions: location links, environmental links, technical links, and user attraction links. It is found to be important for DSTs to support co-location management in MSP by iteratively through the MSP process 1) spatially-temporally locate spatial-temporal links constituting use-use interactions, 2) list conflicts and synergies of the located use-use interactions, and 3) weight the conflicts and synergies. With this analytical framework, two types of DSTs are analysed for their ability to include co-location; matrix- and ranking-based DSTs to detect conflicts and synergies and space allocating DSTs to avoid/minimise conflicts and optimise synergies. Whereas the first group of tools categorise or rank use-use combinations, the latter group use information about which multi-use combinations are possible as pre-existing knowledge, and thus the two groups of DSTs can advantageously be used together. A discrepancy is found between the co-location framework and the DSTs. It is argued that future tools could work on removing this discrepancy by considering the spatial-temporal links of use-use interactions, strengthen the focus on synergies, as well as prioritize ranking of synergies and conflicts over binary approaches that only evaluate spatial compatibility.
The use of the seas and oceans is generally regulated by the United Nations through the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which defines the rights and responsibilities. However, with the rapidly increasing use of the sea and oceans it is inevitable that conflicts may arise. Accordingly, there has been an increasing international recognition of the need to manage human activities that influence the marine environment and its ecosystems in an integrated, cross-sectoral manner. Recently, Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) has gained significant attention as a new paradigm aiming at minimizing the conflicts among different sea uses through involving various stakeholders and sectors while aiming for sustainable growth. The aim of this research is to build a conceptual model for a Data Infrastructure to support marine space in a transnational context addressing the challenges related to the increasing use of marine areas and resources. The work was carried out in a close cooperation between several public authorities and research institutes in the Baltic Sea Region.
The current and potential use of the seas and oceans is often called the 'Blue Economy'. Recently, the European Commission launched its Blue Growth Strategy on the opportunities for marine and maritime sustainable growth. The European Commission considers that Blue Growth is a long-term strategy in the marine and maritime sectors with great potential for innovation and economic growth. Holistic spatial planning systems supporting sustainable development have proven themselves in terrestrial planning and are also needed at sea. Due to this reason,
the BONUS BASMATI project is based on the ecosystem services approach to assist in assessing sustainable solutions corresponding to policy goals.