Tundi Agardy

Transforming management of tropical coastal seas to cope with challenges of the 21st century

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.

Marine spatial planning

Abstract 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?

Addressing transboundary conservation challenges through marine spatial prioritization

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.