Marine Spatial Planning: A Step-by-Step Approach Toward Ecosystem-Based Management

Marine spatial planning (MSP) has been underway in Western European countries for almost a decade. Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, and Norway are already working on second-generation spatial plans for their marine areas in the North and Baltic seas. Other countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Sweden are working on national legislation or other policies that will authorize comprehensive MSP throughout their marine waters. Still others, for example Poland and France, are testing MSP approaches in pilot sites. Early efforts have also begun to scale-up national efforts to the level of regional seas, for example in the North Sea and the Baltic Seas. MSP is currently also being considered in the Arctic Seas. This presentation will summarize good practices for MSP and illustrate that a regional, future-oriented approach is the way forward to make MSP successful. 
Bio: Fanny Douvere is Coordinator of the World Heritage Marine Programme at UNESCO's World Heritage Centre. Previously, she was co-principal investigator of the Ecosystem-based Marine Spatial Planning Initiative at UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, initiated in 2006 with Charles Ehler. The central focus of Ms. Douvere’s work was to help move marine spatial planning beyond the conceptual level by developing a comprehensive, operational, step-by-step approach for its development and implementation. She organized and co-chaired the first international workshop on marine spatial planning (2006) at UNESCO, co-edited the first peer-reviewed special issue of Marine Policy on marine spatial planning (2008), and has just published a UNESCO guide to ecosystem-based, marine spatial planning (2009). Ms. Douvere has been a consultant to WWF-Sweden, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), IUCN-the World Conservation Union, The Nature Conservancy, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Prior to her work at UNESCO, she was one of the coordinators of a project that developed a spatial plan for the Belgian part of the North Sea--one of the first integrated marine planning efforts in the world. She has degrees in international relations and anthropology and comparative cultures.