Developing a masterplan for a sustainable marine sector in a small islands region: Integrated MCE spatial analysis for decision making

Abstract

Strategy is essential in entering a war. The same framework of thinking also needs to be taken into consideration for sensitive tasks, especially those relating to community welfare. With no existing or realistic plan for the development of the fisheries and marine sector in Southeast Maluku Regency—a small island region considered to be a developing region inside the middle-development country of Indonesia—our aim was to craft a baseline masterplan for developing a sustainable marine sector in the regency. The use of multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) combined with spatial analysis for decision making. An analytic network process (ANP) is used to obtain weight priority and cluster weight before further processes with weight sum in ArcGIS. Three potential scenarios for a sustainable marine masterplan were identified: marine culture, fishing, and marine tourism. Each scenario went through three different stages of assessment involving experts from local government, researchers, and marine sector stakeholders. All maps have been normalized with the total population, and showed that 39% of the land in the region is not suitable for catching fisheries, whereas 13% is moderately suitable, and 48% shows fit as a developing area of fishing. As for marine culture, over 50% are not suitable to moderately suitable for marine culture, and 41% are suitable for marine culture. In the case of marine tourism, over 50% of the region of Southeast Maluku District is suitable for marine tourism. This is due to the fact that most villages and sub-districts are located on the coastline, which has beautiful scenery. The study will be used as a starting point for the development of the marine sector in the region in a way that is sustainable and based on the empirical resources.