Search

The acceleration of global warming and increased vulnerability of marine social-ecological systems affect the benefits provided by the ocean. Spatial planning of marine areas is vital to balance multiple human demands and ensure a healthy ocean, while supporting global ocean goals. To thrive in a changing ocean though, marine spatial planning (MSP) must effectively integrate climate change. By reviewing existing literature on MSP and climate change, we explore the links between them and with ocean sustainability, highlight management challenges, and identify potential pathways to guide action towards the effective integration of climate impacts in MSP. A review of marine spatial planning literature identifies links with climate change and gaps in the practical integration of both concepts.

Rarely is the strong link that exists between Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) and Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) explicitly recognised. MSP is the process by which the use of marine space is identified and used to inform development decisions made by regulators. Marine areas that are important for marine conservation/ecology form one of the most common data layers within marine plans. Some of these marine areas will be formally adopted/designated and have legal protection as MPAs; other marine areas may be protected culturally or through informal agreements. Where MPAs do not exist, marine plans can aid in the identification of areas where they could be sited optimally (taking into account environmental, social, economic and political considerations). MPAs and marine plans are generally based on current information, be it habitat/species distribution or marine uses; however, both marine plans and MPAs may be used as tools to drive future sustainable use of the marine environment. This requires recognising existing uses and identifying how these uses may be affected by climate change, economic development, marine users' social licence to operate and also how the government of the day sees the future use of its seas.

The Adriatic and Ionian Region is an important area for both strategic maritime development and biodiversity conservation in the European Union (EU). However, given that both EU and non-EU countries border the sea, multiple legal and regulatory frameworks operate at different scales, which can hinder the coordinated long-term sustainable development of the region. Transboundary marine spatial planning can help overcome these challenges by building consensus on planning objectives and making the trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and its influence on economically important sectors more explicit. We address this challenge by developing and testing 4 spatial prioritization strategies with the decision-support tool Marxan, which meets targets for biodiversity conservation while minimizing impacts to users. We evaluated these strategies in terms of how priority areas shift under different scales of target setting (e.g., regional vs. country level). We also examined the trade-off between cost-efficiency and how equally solutions represent countries and maritime industries (n = 14) operating in the region with the protection-equality metric. We found negligible differences in where priority conservation areas were located when we set targets for biodiversity at the regional versus country scale. Conversely, the prospective impacts on industries, when considered as costs to be minimized, were highly divergent across scenarios and biased the placement of protection toward industries located in isolation or where there were few other industries. We recommend underpinning future marine spatial planning efforts in the region through identification of areas of national significance, transboundary areas requiring cooperation between countries, and areas where impacts on maritime industries require careful consideration of the trade-off between biodiversity conservation and socioeconomic objectives.

Planning for marine areas, from coastal to open-ocean regions, is being developed worldwide to foster sustainable ocean management and governance. Over the past decades, significant progress has been made by governments in their thinking about marine spatial planning (MSP). MSP is globally widespread and a topic of increasing importance in the scientific and policy realms. It is currently under development in almost 70 countries, encompassing six continents and four ocean basins. Despite its acceptance and use, development and implementation of MSP still faces a myriad of present and future, conceptual and practical challenges, some of them being more striking and widespread. Here, we highlight seven major challenges that need to be properly addressed so that MSP can truly contribute to a sustainable use of the world's oceans. These include, among others, shortcomings in political and institutional frameworks, stakeholder engagement, encompassing human and social dimensions in MSP, balancing economic development and marine ecosystem conservation, and adapting to global environmental change.

Planning of marine areas is being developed worldwide to foster sustainable ocean management and governance. Marine spatial planning (MSP) is a process that aims to organize the use of the ocean space, as well as the interactions among human uses (e.g., fisheries, aquaculture, shipping, tourism, renewable energy production) and between users and the marine environment. Over the past 30 years, significant progress has been made by governments in their thinking about MSP. The MSP is currently under development in over 66 countries (44% of the nations with marine waters), encompassing six continents and four ocean basins, and the interest in MSP continues to grow. While most countries are still in the early phase of their MSP initiatives, others have already approved, implemented, or even revised marine spatial plans for many years. Despite its acceptance and use, development and implementation of MSP still faces several conceptual and practical challenges, from political to institutional, social, economic, scientific, and environmental sources. The present chapter provides a review on all these topics by addressing three main questions: what is MSP and why is it needed; what is the global distribution of MSP around the world, together with its state of development by region; and what are some of the most prominent and widespread challenges, present and future, that are linked to the development of MSP?

The assessment and mapping of ecosystem services (ES) has become an increasingly important instrument for environmental management and conservation priority-setting. As such, this practice can be used in ecosystem-based Marine Spatial Planning (MSP). MSP is recognized as an opportunity to achieve socio-economic and ecological goals simultaneously, to suggest solutions for sustainable management of marine environment and its resources. In this study, we propose an operational approach that includes novel spatial analysis in the marine field to quantify and map supporting ecosystem services. Such approach spans the 3D-dimension of the marine environment, considering all marine domains (sea surface, water column, seabed) separately. Our approach is focused on mapping supporting ES of the Adriatic Sea, to grant their preservation in order to guarantee the delivery of all other ES. Supporting ES provision in the Adriatic was quantified through the use of indicators that denote ES delivery and that are specifically related to the three marine domains. We identified areas of elevated provisioning levels of multiple supporting ES in the Adriatic, which is hypothesized to be priority areas of conservation. Our results confirm the importance of explicitly including the pelagic domain in planning and conservation processes. Areas that provide the lowest levels of supporting ES delivery were also mapped, to indicate possible ‘sacrificial areas’ for industrial or intensive use. The spatial coincidence of the determined hotspots areas of ES delivery associated with particular marine areas that are and are not under conservation regimes was analysed. This approach led us to test the applicability of the method for identifying marine areas for conservation purposes. Our methodological approach aims at producing relevant scientific knowledge for prioritizing marine conservation and sustainable management actions, to be used in MSP and marine management.

1. The use of targets to provide measurable objectives and benchmarks for management, conservation, and restoration of ecosystems is commonplace. In the marine and coastal realms, targets have been successful in setting sustainable limits to fisheries harvests, thresholds for pollutants, and recommended amounts of representative habitat included in marine protected area (MPA) networks. Quantifiable targets can dissuade governments from making dubious claims about investments in ocean protection that sound impressive but cannot be verified. Examples are presented where protection targets have been used successfully for marine management, and instances where measurable and meaningful benchmarks serve to allow tracking of true progress. 2. However, the setting of targets can also be a double-edged sword. In some cases, targets have proven useful, but in many instances, interventions made to fulfil targets not only give a false illusion of progress or even success, they present opportunity costs that impede further conservation. 3. Some of these issues were raised in the 2003 article ‘Dangerous Targets?: Unresolved issues and ideological clashes around marine protected areas’ that appeared in Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems. Since its publication, the article’s warnings about how targets can sometimes be dangerous and counter-productive have led to intense debate among scientists and policy-makers alike, and the paper has been cited in more than 500 publications. Yet today, more than a dozen years after the first ‘Dangerous Targets’ publication, new targets are driving more MPA designations and conservation strategies than ever before, and the ‘dangerous’ aspects of target setting have been largely ignored. 4. This paper discusses old ‘dangers’ in the context of new developments in marine conservation, including the lingering problem of having simplistic metrics drive marine policies, and the unintended result that can often occur when outputs (percentage of area under MPA designation) do not align with true outcomes of effective management and conservation. Newly emerging ‘dangers’ in letting areal targets (percentage of area under MPA designation) drive MPA designations are also discussed, including how the rush to fulfil obligations to protect a certain proportion of area is taking place in planning, separate from broader level, and potentially more holistic, marine spatial planning (MSP). 5. The paper suggests five recommendations that would allow policy-makers to use targets more effectively, including: (1) increase transparency in planning, especially around specific goals and objectives of MPA establishment; (2) use time-based areal targets when representativity is a goal of the protected area strategy; (3)

Over 1.3 billion people live on tropical coasts, primarily in developing countries. Many depend on adjacent coastal seas for food, and livelihoods. We show how trends in demography and in several local and global anthropogenic stressors are progressively degrading capacity of coastal waters to sustain these people. Far more effective approaches to environmental management are needed if the loss in provision of ecosystem goods and services is to be stemmed. We propose expanded use of marine spatial planning as a framework for more effective, pragmatic management based on ocean zones to accommodate conflicting uses. This would force the holistic, regional-scale reconciliation of food security, livelihoods, and conservation that is needed. Transforming how countries manage coastal resources will require major change in policy and politics, implemented with sufficient flexibility to accommodate societal variations. Achieving this change is a major challenge – one that affects the lives of one fifth of humanity.

Although significant advancements on protecting marine biodiversity and ecosystems of the Mediterranean Sea have been made, much remains to be done to achieve the targets set by the Convention for Biological Diversity (and the Barcelona Convention) and ratified by the 21 Mediterranean governments. Particularly, these targets require the design and implementation of an ecologically representative network of marine protected areas that covers 10% of the Mediterranean surface by 2020. Despite the many efforts to gather spatial information about threats to the Mediterranean and conservation planning initiatives that identify sensitive areas for conservation, we are far from achieving this target. In this paper, we briefly review existing and proposed conservation initiatives at various scales throughout the Mediterranean to recognise those that have political endorsement and those that serve more as lobbying tools. We then propose a model process that can be applied to advance marine spatial planning within the eleven ecologically and biologically significant areas (EBSAs) through a multi-step process designed for moving conservation forward in this particularly complex region. The proposed process combines tenets of professional urban/regional planning and systematic conservation planning. As shown with two specific examples, despite some conventional wisdom, there is enough information on the Mediterranean Sea to move forward with ecosystem-based marine spatial management for conservation purposes using the EBSAs as a starting point - and the time is right to do so.

A blind faith in the ability of MPAs to counteract loss of biodiversity is fraught with risk, especially when MPAs are poorly planned and when the consequences of establishing MPAs are not adequately thought out. MPA shortcomings are categorized as one of five main types: (1) MPAs that by virtue of their small size or poor design are ecologically insufficient; (2) inappropriately planned or managed MPAs; (3) MPAs that fail due to the degradation of the unprotected surrounding ecosystems; (4) MPAs that do more harm than good due to displacement and unintended consequences of management; and (5) MPAs that create a dangerous illusion of protection when in fact no protection is occurring. A strategic alternative, which fully utilizes the strengths of the MPA tool while avoiding the pitfalls, can overcome these shortcomings: integrating marine protected area planning in broader marine spatial planning and ocean zoning efforts.