The Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management (SwAM) hosted a national stakeholder meeting yesterday to discuss and collect input from stakeholders on SwAMs recently released draft report on marine spatial planning for Swedish waters.
The report Marine spatial planning โ current state 2014 seems to be quite comprehensive, the report says to have the marine ecosystem as a starting and reference point for all activities considered. It touches on the concept of ecosystem services as a tool to evaluate and analyse the effect different activities has on both the marine environment as well as how these affect other activities.
Marine spatial plans are used as a tool to prevent conflicts between various interests and assist in solving conflicts that do occur, it does so by setting out and clarifying which interests that are prioritised in various areas. An important tool as many interests are shared, such as in shipping, fishing, wind energy, tourism, defense, and material extraction.
What became clear during the meeting and discussions is that the marine spatial planning seems to have partially or largely ignored the directives and policies that concern the marine environment such as the marine strategy framework directive, water framework directive, birds directive and partially the new common fisheries policy, who all will have an impact on how the marine environment is to be used as well as contain legislation that feasibly needs to be considered in the marine spatial planning.
It was said that the marine spatial planning is a tool for a holistic approach, but how can it be holistic if not all parts are incorporated?! If it does not take into consideration and encompass the present directives.
The national stakeholder meeting will be followed by a series of regional stakeholder meetings in the following weeks as a tool to collect input on the draft planning from a regional. The input from these stakeholder meetings will later be processed together with written comments submitted to SwAM and taken into consideration in the final plan. Swedenโs final marine spatial planning is expected to be released later this year.