Up until the beginning of the financial crisis, there had been a growth in maritime transport, significant pressure from fisheries and aquaculture and a sharp increase in the number of people living by the coast and in coastal tourism. There has also been a marked rise in the need for investment in offshore energy as part of the 2020 objectives. These are reasons why there is a need for good coordination and good, shared use of the sea. The Integrated Maritime Policy ⁽¹⁾ and its action plan ⁽²⁾, adopted by the EU in December 2007, intends to respond to this need and to ensure that there is an improvement in the coordination of these activities. For this purpose, the Commission has in particular proposed creating a series of ‘cross-sectoral’ tools, including maritime spatial planning. According to the Commission, this should constitute “the stable framework, legal security and predictability, which are preconditions to pursuing and increasing investment in maritime sectors, both from European as well as external actors”.

Already used on land, the principle is widely ignored once it comes to maritime space and the distribution of this space between different activities. Concerned not to generate opposition and having had its fingers burnt by the difficulties it encountered with the draft directive on the protection of soils, the Commission has taken care, right from the outset, to ensure that it covers all the bases. Planning of maritime space is the member states’ responsibility in terms of its implementation. The principle of subsidiarity applies but coordination of action at EU level can significantly improve the results: working jointly on the planning of maritime space will make it possible to set up a framework within which the different sectoral approaches can be coordinated; the efficiency and coherence of EU policy and national policies will be improved and the economic costs caused by a lack of coordination reduced.

On the ground, spatial planning should, says the Commission, offer a series of long-term advantages: accelerated development of new commercial services based on easily accessible data, improvement in the efficiency of public institutions, including European marine research laboratories, the elimination of a number of uncertainties relating to global environmental change, integration – as part of a consolidated effort – of initiatives that are currently fragmented and limited in time covering access to data, clearer rules concerning rights and limitations in marine waters, easier regulation of conflicts relating to the upgrading of cross-border territory, the more efficient use of available resources in terms of notification and surveillance, and the possibility to share common surveillance systems in the future. This tool, adds the Commission, will free up investment because it will create some security for investors while improving the application of the principle of management by ecosystems: in other words, planning of maritime space is good for growth and employment as much as it is for the environment, which are also the three pillars of the EU’s 2020 strategy.

TEN BASIC PRINCIPLES

Maritime space planning is a fairly new process. However, a growing number of member states already do it or are preparing to do it – adoption of laws and regulations and/or implementation of adapted management structures (UK, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Poland, Norway, France, Spain) – and a series of instruments and criteria are being developed through different EU projects. To avoid everyone going ahead willy-nilly, the Commission published, in 2008, a ‘Road map for maritime spatial planning: Achieving common principles in the EU’ ⁽³⁾, in which it sets out ten basic principles:

1. Plan maritime space based on the region and type of activity

2. Set objectives to guide maritime space planning

3. Develop maritime space planning in a transparent way

4. Make interested parties participate

5. Coordinate within the member states – simplify the decision making process

6. Ensure the legal impact of maritime space planning at the national level

7. Cooperate and consult across borders

8. Introduce checks and evaluation into the planning process

9. Ensure coherence between the upgrading of land and maritime space planning – links with the integrated management of coastal areas

10. Prepare a solid database and knowledge base

These ten principles are widely accepted by member states already. Their reliability still needs to be safeguarded with the guarantee that all the member states will act according to these principles and that everyone will be put on an equal footing in the EU. This demand comes from interested parties. The Commission, which considers it to be well-founded, is going to make the necessary proposals for its implementation. It remains to be seen how and in what form, but the important thing is to ensure that not just everyone in Europe follows these principles but also neighbouring countries do. Thinking about the issue is ongoing and is being fuelled by pilot projects.

LEGISLATION OR NO LEGISLATION?

For now, the road map on spatial planning does not envisage legislation but that does not mean that such an approach has been totally ruled out. Both civil society and the Commission and member states are beginning to consider it. The Commission stresses that it is a highly legal process and that the real question is to work out how to ensure that all the coastal countries develop spatial planning based on common principles. The issue is a sensitive one. It touches on a part of national territory and therefore touches on member states’ sovereignty. It is a sensitivity that can also be seen at the regional level, which does not nevertheless reject the idea that some regulation could, over time, prove necessary, as Michel Delebarre, the mayor of Dunkirk and author of a Committee of the Regions report on maritime policy, points out: “The choice of proceeding initially via calls for projects so as to experiment with maritime spatial planning seems to me to be the right one. It would at the very least be odd to legislate before learning the first lessons from these experiences. By contrast, using binding instruments for certain points should not be rejected on principle. There is so much at stake that a European Union initiative that would aim, for example, to better articulate wind development areas, extraction areas or protected marine areas determined by countries at the level of the same regional sea would no doubt be welcome.”

But if member states do not have well-established jurisdiction in an area, it is difficult for them to do the planning. Any regulatory process must therefore be based on exclusive economic areas (200 nautical miles). Even the directive on marine environment (see below) has, in this respect, a restricted scope as it is reduced to 12 nautical miles, the maximum for territorial waters. An extension to 200 nautical miles is not essential: the strongest pressures are exerted closest to the coasts. Wind plants are not installed beyond 200 nautical miles and fisheries and aquaculture are also usually limited to this area. In practice, while this issue does not pose any problem in the Baltic Sea (all the neighbouring countries, except for Russia, are EU members and have established exclusive economic areas), the situation is very different in the Mediterranean and Black Seas, bordered by numerous non-EU countries and not having declared exclusive economic areas. In these cases, the issue is more or less well managed in the context of regional organisations: successfully by the Helcom Convention (Baltic, for relations with Russia), with more difficulties for the Barcelona Convention (Mediterranean) and the Bucharest Convention (Black Sea).

ECOSYSTEM APPROACH

The sustainable management of marine regions is closely linked to the state of the ecosystem of these regions, too, points out the Commission, in accordance with the Integrated Maritime Policy. The ecosystem approach is a principle that is valid for all aspects of maritime space planning. Another point is that, although land activities have a direct impact on maritime regions, the planning of maritime space only manages maritime activities and those carried out in coastal waters, which can generate some tensions when it comes to integrating the integrated management of coastal zones into the Integrated Maritime Policy, currently managed by DG Environment.

The link is thus directly established with the ‘environmental’ pillar of the strategy (see separate article) and its main legislative instruments, from which spatial planning is far from being absent, even if it is not always mentioned in the same terms.

It is required by:

- Framework Directive 2008/56/EC establishing a strategy for the marine environment, which stipulates that member states “have to develop programmes of measures,” including “the regulation of spatial and temporal distribution” (Articles 13 and 24, set out in Annex VI, Paragraphs 3 and 4)

- Framework Directive 2000/60/EC on the management of water, which envisages the development of management plans through hydrological basins

- Directive 92/43/EEC on the protection of species and natural habitats, which provides for the integration of maritime protected areas in the Natura 2000 network

- Directive 2001/42/EC on strategic environmental evaluation, which requires that certain minimum environmental measures are integrated into the decision making process and into member states’ planning

- Recommendation 2002/413/EC relating to the implementation of an integrated management strategy of the coastal areas in Europe, which foresees, inter alia, “developing national strategic plans for the coast to promote integrated management ensuring, inter alia, the control of additional urbanisation and of the exploitation of non-urban areas while respecting natural features of the coastal environment”.

Planning of maritime space is the member states’ responsibility in terms of its implementation
⁽¹⁾ (COM(2007)575)
⁽²⁾ SEC(2007)1278
⁽³⁾ COM(2008) 791