Working Group for Marine Planning and Coastal Zone Management (WGMPCZM; outputs from 2019 meeting)

The Working Group Marine Planning and Coastal Zone Management (WGMPCZM) discusses current developments around marine spatial planning (MSP) and coastal zone management (CZM) in the ICES area.

Driven both by a need to address specific spatial problems in the sea and by the EU Directive on Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) from 2014 with approaching deadline (2021) and by a number of international R&D projects, different nations’ marine planning in the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) has entered a highly prolific phase. This implies integrating knowledge of various kinds across disciplines and national borders for whole marine basins. To make planning more well-informed and consistent across marine basins, there is a need to improve the knowledge base and develop appropriate procedures and methods to collect and process new and existing data in a consistent manner to produce planning evidence. To help achieve this, the group has worked on a number of terms of reference:

Answering the term of reference (ToR) which aims to review updates from national MSP, espe-cially in relation to cross-border issues and land-sea interactions and the role of science in marine planning, the working group has annually reviewed the developments in coastal and marine planning across member countries and relevant cross-border collaboration projects and mapped the highly varying roles of science. As a first synthesis, the group presented a discussion poster at the ICES Annual Science Conference (ASC) 2019, including a fourfold typology of interactions between science and policy making in terms of knowledge production: from highly dependent internal expertise over policy driven research and development to highly independent research, and, cutting across this, a fourth highly interactive co-production of knowledge including also societal actors. When collecting and compiling relevant data and knowledge into planning evi-dence it is important to be aware of both the diversity of knowledge types needed (multiple knowledge fields - both scientific and practical) and of these different processes, roles and re-sponsibilities and dependencies. It is recognised that the breadth and depth of data and infor-mation held by ICES and the knowledge of the community can greatly enhance the implemen-tation of MSP. Mechanisms to help this were considered, in particular the extent to which the holdings of the spatial data facility can help address the key data requirements of MSP according to a developed categorisation of data types.

In parallel to this and based on reviews in different terms of reference and the insights from a session arranged by the WG at the ASC 2018 (Session C), important knowledge and method development needs for MSP and ICZM, were identified. These current and future needs include: spatialising and linking societal and ecosystem processes and interconnections, social and eco-nomic sustainability aspects (addressing culturally significant areas and conflicts and coexistence), knowledge on land sea interactions at different scales, cumulative impacts both between uses and within ecosystems, monitoring and evaluation of plans, risks and hazards and awareness, not least in relation to climate change. Accordingly, the working group has kept and adapted its ToRs for its next term to include e.g. ocean governance, climate change, restoration of biodiversity, land-sea interactions, and analysis of impacts on coastal communities and proposed a new Working Group on Cumulative Effects Assessment Approaches in Management (WGCEAM). With a developing field of practice, there is also a need to provide professional training for MSP and join forces on this and promoting a critical, self-reflecting attitude among the increasing field of planning professionals, supported both by accompanying and by more independent research. Last but not least, the perspective needs to be kept broad, thinking beyond MSP and coastal management towards integrative ocean governance.