Report of the Working Group for Marine Planning and Coastal Zone Management (WGMPCZM)

The Working Group for Marine Planning and Coastal Zone Management (WGMPCZM) met in Copenhagen, Denmark, 23–27 April 2018 with 14 members present.A review of developments in marine planning across member countries and funded collabo-rative projects was informed by a large number of contributions, summarised in Annexes to this report. The roles of science and policy in these case studies were explored by the group and will be the subject of a peer reviewed manuscript to be developed interses-sionally.Further development of cumulative effects assessment methodologies was discussed in the con-text of the output of recent workshops exploring quantitative application of “bow-tie” methodology (WKRASM, WKPASM, WKBNBT). As an outcome of these workshops a manuscript (CRR) is under preparation applying the approach to EU legislation (MSFD) and a peer review paper explaining the challenges encountered has been submitted. As a result the preparation of a manual and handbook for the methodology will no longer be progressed. Instead, a workshop in 2019 is proposed on aggregating common pressures from human activities. Planning was also continued for a UN-ECE symposium on risk management for achievement of targets under Sustainable Development Goal 14 (life below water) in October 2018, Reykjavik, Iceland.Marine planning skills and capacity were addressed through continued review of develop-ment and applications of the MSP challenge serious game, which has become widely used in multiple for an over the last year to great benefit. There was further consideration of the modification and roll out of the ICES training course on MSP again in 2019.A systematic review of approaches to monitoring and evaluation of marine spatial planning was further developed during the meeting and plan for completion and submission by co-authors agreed.Work to account for culturally sensitive areas (CSA) in marine planning was continued through review of the outputs of a workshop (WKVSCA) held in early 2018. This work-shop report will be completed for June 2018 and will lead to the development of of a CRR and peer reviewed manuscript on the methods to identify CSA and vulnerability and risk assessment of impacts on CSAs.To develop approaches to evaluate the benefits of coexistence and synergy in MSP, the outputs of the workshop WKCSMSP were reviewed which was held in April 2018 jointly with the Horizon 2020 MUSES project. Here a classification of types of coexistence and synergy was developed, and the role of MSP in promoting these benefits was defined, identifying that MSP alone may not be sufficient in some cases. The workshop outputs will form a report and contribute to a CRR under development for year 3 on this subject.