Abstract
Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) processes seek to better manage ocean spaces by balancing multiple objectives across ecological, social and economic objectives. To meet this challenge, MSP approaches and tools have evolved globally, from local to national scales. During two International Marine Conservation Congresses in 2016 and 2018, MSP practitioners and researchers from diverse geographies and socio-economic contexts met to share advances in practical approaches and spatial tools to achieve multi-objective MSP. Here we share the commonalities that emerged from studies conducted in Belize, Canada (British Columbia), South Africa, Seychelles, the United Kingdom and the USA (California). We identify seven practical approaches that we believe are broadly relevant to any multi-objective MSP process: (1) indigenous and local knowledge should inform planning goals and objectives; (2) transparent and evidence-based approaches can avoid conflict and build trust and legitimacy; (3) simple ecosystem service models and scenarios can facilitate multi-objective planning; (4) trade-off analyses can balance diverse objectives; (5) ecosystem service may assist planning for high value-data poor Blue Economy sectors; (6) game theoretic decision rules can help to deliver fair, equitable and win-win spatial allocation solutions; and (7) strategic mapping products can facilitate decision making amongst stakeholders from different sectors.
Highlights
Over the last decade, marine spatial planning (MSP) has become an increasingly accepted approach to achieve multiple objectives for ocean management
California has implemented a statewide network of marine protected areas (MPAs) through a process that included the use of predictive models and trade-off analyses to help balance conservation goals with fisheries objectives (Rassweiler et al, 2014), the region has not engaged in spatial planning for offshore aquaculture or other emerging ocean industries
Marine spatial planning is a broadly accepted approach by most governments to better manage the sustainable use of ocean space, and has even become a requirement by some public lenders to ensure sustainable economic development in coastal and marine waters (Smith, 2017)
Summary
Marine spatial planning (MSP) has become an increasingly accepted approach to achieve multiple objectives for ocean management. MSP presents several significant challenges including choosing appropriate data, models and decision support tools to inform the planning process. Spatial tools for, multi-objective marine planning are necessary to address particular challenges posed by the different spatial, temporal and socio-economic scales of uses and activities in a given planning context (De Santo, 2013). Almost 100 decision-support tools for MSP have been developed (Beck et al, 2009; Bolman et al, 2018) but there is varied success for using these tools during real-world planning processes, in data-poor geographies and SIDS (Pınarbası et al, 2017). Given that MSP is a public and participatory process to address ecological, social, and economic objectives with stakeholders in a transparent way, decision-support tools need to be able to estimate, visualize, and evaluate trade-offs among overlapping uses or conflicts among activities. The approaches presented here are not comprehensive and do not represent a systematic review of all active processes around the world, they reflect an assortment of actual on-the-ground experiences that we believe are broadly relevant and can contribute to the evolution of MSP today
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