The pressures exerted on natural marine resources and the demand for ecological marine services are rising. In addition, reducing the impact of these pressures on the marine waters irrespective of the place where their effects are the most sensitive is more than ever necessary both to safeguard the marine environment itself and to ensure that the related activities can continue in the longer term. The Integrated Maritime Policy cannot therefore do without an important environmental aspect, made concrete by a strategy for the protection of the marine environment and Directive 2008/56/EC, which defines its objectives, principles and obligations.

The strategy is based on the assertion that achieving the economic potential of the seas and oceans requires above all a high level of protection of the marine environment and therefore aims to guarantee that all the EU’s marine waters will be environmentally healthy by 2020. To that end, the Commission is working on an integrated approach based on ecosystems, which addresses all the pressures and damage suffered by the marine environment and their cumulative effects.

The strategy also includes a significant ‘research’ aspect, which is drawn on to make up for the current lack of knowledge about the marine environment. While there is sufficient proof of the degradation of the seas and oceans and the pace at which that is happening – loss of fish resources, pollution and the impact of climate change – the existing surveillance and evaluation programmes are neither integrated nor complete.

OBJECTIVES AND TIMETABLE

The directive, adopted on 17 June 2008, establishes the principle of ‘marine regions’, places where member states will work together to achieve objectives defined in the strategy. Four regions (with possible subregions) are defined as such: the Baltic Sea, the North-East Atlantic, the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea. In each region and the subregions that they belong to, member states have to coordinate their action amongst each other as well as with the non-EU countries concerned. The directive then gives orientations and sets deadlines. It stipulates that member states will have to evaluate the state of their marine waters, develop national strategies and design measures aimed at giving their marine environment a high level of protection. These measures will include evaluations of the impact and detailed cost/benefit analyses to reduce the costs as much as possible and to take account of the socio-economic dimension of sustainable development. No specific management measure will be taken at the EU level. The text states that it is up to the member states to make the directive operational and to implement it at the level of their marine regions.

Each member state must develop a marine strategy for its own waters, in close coordination with the other member states and non-EU countries located in each marine region concerned. In the four years that follow the entry into force of the directive (mid-July 2008), member states assess the environmental state of the waters concerned and the environmental impact that human activities are having on them. They will jointly determine what must be understood by ‘good environmental state’ of the waters for each region. For its part, the Commission will define the criteria and standards that make it possible to recognise this ‘good environmental state’ to guide this process and ensure that it is applied coherently.

In addition, within five years, member states will have to have defined environmental objectives leading to this ‘good environmental state’ (restoring some ecosystems, reducing pollution). Within six years, they will establish and apply a surveillance programme to measure progress made towards this ‘good environmental state’ and will have developed, before 2016, a programme of measures to achieve this objective. This programme will be able to address issues, such as the activities needed to restore degraded ecosystems, the volume of admissible human activity and the extent to which disruption of ecosystems is allowed as well as the tools that will mitigate this and remedy it. The Commission will approve these programmes, which will need to be up and running in 2018 at the latest.

PEDESTAL OR PILLAR?

Regarded by some as one of the ‘pillars’ of the Integrated Maritime Policy in the same way as others (transport, fisheries) and by others as a ‘pedestal’ or ‘platform’ on which the whole edifice would stand, the directive includes a large number of concepts and measures that are also to be found in the Integrated Maritime Policy.

Thus, in terms of governance, it includes the ecosystemic approach (Article 1) and the management by basin (Articles 5 and 6), the demand for action plans (Article 5 Paragraph 3) as well as the evaluation of the impact of human activities and an economic and social analysis of the use of the waters (Article 8 and Annex III). Under what the Integrated Maritime Policy calls cross-sectoral tools, the directive identifies the obligation to develop coordinated surveillance programmes, based on homogeneous methods (Article 11) as well as the possibility to take spatial protection measures and territorial planning measures (Article 13, set out in detail by Annex VI). Finally, the directive explicitly provides for the obligation of public information and participation (Article 19).

To avoid any controversy, the talk will be rather of ‘convergence’, the Integrated Maritime Policy claiming the objective of a sustainable development of maritime activities, which cannot be designed without taking into account environmental demands.

This convergence is now clearly stated in the ‘prospects and vision of the future’ chapter from the IMP progress report, adopted in October 2009, and whose guideline on marine strategy is one of the six priorities (see separate article). Specifically, the objective is “to define the boundaries of sustainability of human activities having an influence on the marine environment” and to develop a platform to improve the way in which all maritime activities are carried out by taking due account of their cumulative impact. For this purpose, the plan is also to strengthen cooperation between all the sectors and services concerned, including marine sciences and policy relating to the marine environment.