Abstract
Europe’s marine waters are some of the busiest and most intensively exploited on Earth. The EU is the sixth-largest producer of fishery and aquaculture products, and nearly 80% of global shipping (by volume) and over 90% of installed offshore wind capacity occurs in EU seas.
These and other maritime sectors, such as coastal tourism, oil and gas, and shipbuilding, to name a few, have enormous impacts on EU economies and marine species. Striking the balance between sustainable human activities and healthy ecosystems is vital to alleviate the impacts of climate change via carbon storage and renewable energy. By leaving space for nature to recover, the EU can be a global champion to fight biodiversity loss and support food security for the billions of people whose seafood is connected to European waters.
Among numerous European policies that aim to secure a sustainable balance for marine spaces and resources is the Maritime Spatial Planning Directive (MSPD, 2014/89/EU). The MSPD was developed to provide an integrated planning and adaptive approach to how the EU and its Member States (MS) manage human-led activities in their waters. Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) is a future-oriented process that considers all economic sectors and ecological factors related to a marine area and allocates space, both geographically and temporally, to different activities and people whose livelihoods are tied to our seas for the purpose of ensuring a long-term sustainable balance between people and nature.
The MSPD set 31 March 2021 as the deadline for MS to present their maritime spatial plans to the European Commission. The objective of these plans is to detail a nation’s strategies for the sustainable management of their marine areas and resources. While the MSPD initiated the much-needed conditions and means to support public policy for maritime planning at the national, regional and EU levels, its absence of clear definitions for key concepts of MSP and guidance on steps to follow for establishing national plans has resulted in a disjointed seascape of how MS seek to implement the MSPD, jeopardising the objectives for safeguarding a sustainable balance between nature and human activities across the EU.
A crucial manifestation of these gaps in the MSPD came when only six of the EU’s twenty-two coastal countries (Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland, Latvia and Portugal) met the March 2021 deadline, despite some MS having some form of maritime planning in place. This meant that, officially, less than 38% of EU waters had a tentative, coherent, sustainable and forward-looking plan in place for the various maritime sectors involved. Between March and the end of 2021, however, several other MS published their plans, including France, one of the countries assessed in this report. In addition to France, this analysis focuses on the maritime spatial plans of the other North-East Atlantic MS, namely Ireland, Portugal and Spain.