New Needs and New Tools for Marine Management

J. M. Miranda

Instituto Português do Mar e da Atmosfera,

Rua C do Aeroporto de Lisboa, 1749 077 Lisboa, Portugal

1 THE CHALLENGE

Huge changes are taking place in the governance of

the oceans. The implementation of the UNCLOS

agreement is creating new rules in what concerns the

national responsibility for large areas of the seafloor.

Maritime transportation is continuously increasing as

the most cost-effective solution for international

trade, creating virtual ocean highways. Growing

energy demands, and the need to decarbonize the

economy are leading to the installation of large power

systems close to the coasts, competing with the

traditional uses of the ocean, like fisheries or leisure.

During the XX Century marine management was

mainly based on a project-by-project or permit-by

permit approach (Douvere, 2008), with no explicit

incorporation of the interplay between the different

values in stake. Marine spatial planning (MSP) is

emerging as a tool to support the implementation of

an ecosystem approach to marine management,

supporting ocean governance. It intends to provide

legal certainty and predictability for the public and

the private use of the ocean and help to quantify the

consequences of alternative management strategies.

The development of GIS-based MSP is growing

fast but it is still strongly constrained by large gaps in

baseline data, time and space heterogeneity between

the different data sources, and the limitation of the

physical, chemical and biological models to reflect

natural processes. Economic and social constraints

are also a major question in the decision process and

its trade-off with the environmental values is

dependent on political strategies. While we are not

able to mathematically model the complexity of

socio-environmental systems, management decisions

cannot be reduced to algorithms to be applied by IT

systems. Nevertheless, there is an increase role for

spatially-explicit systems as the backbone of the

marine management decision systems. The on-going

international initiative to define significant Marine

Protected Areas is the opportunity to put extra

emphasis on the development of spatially explicit

systems as the basic infrastructure for adaptive

management and public participation.

2 TERRITORIAL

MANAGEMENT OF OCEAN

AREAS

Major differences exist between spatial planning on

land and spatial planning on sea. Differences relate

with the true three-dimensional nature of marine

environment, the different level of scientific

knowledge concerning interrelationships between

ecosystems and between them and the highly variable

ocean environment, the stronger interconnection

between ecosystems forced by the ocean circulation,

the difficulty of maintaining long term monitoring

strategies, and the large time scales of most processes.

The rapid development of satellite platforms to

provide continuous monitoring of the atmosphere and

land areas faces additional difficulties in what

concerns ocean areas where it is mainly limited to

surface observations.

The fast development of spatially-explicit systems

for territorial management was fostered by the

possibility of such systems to visualize the

consequences of alternative management policies,

and the associated uncertainties. Presently they are

the only realistic approach to develop awareness from

the citizens and, ultimately, to enforce public policies.

The use of spatial analysis techniques for territorial

management in land is a well-established approach. It

is expectable that the same approach could be

extended from shore to the coastal areas and,

ultimately, to the deep ocean.

One of the crucial differences between territorial

management on land and in the ocean concerns the

different level of awareness of the consequences of

management decisions. The ocean cannot be directly

visualized by humans as is the case of forests or

coastal areas; actions taken on a specific place have

fast consequences on distant spots. This gives

de Miranda J.

New Needs and New Tools for Marine Management.

DOI: 10.5220/0006805800010001

In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Geographical Information Systems Theory, Applications and Management (GISTAM 2017), pages 7-9

ISBN: 978-989-758-252-3

increased role to sophisticated spatial representation

that will replace the direct visualization of the marine

landscape.

3 DEALING WITH PRESSURES

AND FEED-BACKS

One of the advantages of spatially-explicit systems to

support marine spatial planning is the possibility to

analyze alternative management scenarios. Properly

parameterized, such a system can allow a robust

evaluation of the sensitivity of the environment to

pressures, incorporate information concerning the

frequency of their occurrence, and consider multiple

pressures with complex feedbacks acting at the same

time and referring either to space-based concepts (e.g.

habitats) or to moving agents (e.g. populations). We

must also keep in mind that while physical factors are

easily expressed in a quantitative way, the measure of

ecosystem sensitivity is mainly the object of expert

assessment mostly qualitative (Stelzenmüller et al.,

2010).

Lets consider for example the three main

pressures identified by Stelzenmüller et al., (2010) for

studies conducted in the North Sea: demersal fishing,

hydrocarbon industry, and aggregate dredging. They

have different spatial and temporal impacts, complex

exploration patterns and large unknowns on the

connection between actions and effects. Fishing has a

wide spreading widespread impact on marine

habitats, while the focus of the activity is focused on

“stocks” this meaning on explorable fish populations,

which move continuously in the water column,

spawning, ageing and interacting with other species

and the physical environment. Hydrocarbon

exploration is a technological intensive operation,

which deeply affects the seafloor in very limited

areas, but has side effects during exploration and

exploitation. Aggregate dredging is a more localized

activity, being its effects essentially related with

sediment plumes driven by oceanographic processes

and the possible destruction of small size but highly

valued habitats.

Habitat mapping is missing in the majority of the

ocean space. Scientific knowledge is focused on a few

“hot spots”, critical species or interactions. Socio-

economic data are lacking even in rich and well

organized countries. Therefore, pragmatism led to the

development of systems with a limited focus or a

specific area (Caldow et al., 2015). Such systems

must be viewed as “preliminary”. Future

developments must be rooted on solid science, dense

baseline data, efficient monitoring strategies and,

most importantly, scrutiny by organizations and

citizens.

4 DEALING WITH COMPETING

NEEDS

The use of spatially-explicit marine management

tools is seen as a key factor to reduce conflicts

between competing management goals, decrease

incompatibilities between different uses, and ensure

the long-term stability of the marine system (Douvere

and Ehler, 2009; Gimpel et al., 2015). However, its

true implementation asks for significant progresses in

the knowledge of the ocean environment, the capacity

to monitor main environmental deep sea processes,

the resolution of conflicts between incompatible uses

of the ocean and the development of complex

economic and ecological assessment tools to support

the participation of stakeholders in the decision

processes. GIS-like technologies are a core part of

this effort.

Here, there is an important distinction between

technological tools to display observations, scientific

interpretations or regulatory instruments, and

organize public participation, from technological

tools needed to support the action of planners in the

establishment of these regulatory instruments.

Display capabilities must be able to allow

stakeholders a virtual view of the processes taking

place in the deep ocean either obtained from sensors

and mobile platforms, or synthetized from indirect

information. The heterogeneity of the distribution of

environmental values must be described at a proper

scale, and the existence of distant connections

between geochemical and biological processes must

be clearly addressed.

Tools for decision making are often based on the

use of multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) techniques

(Gimpel et al., 2015) that must also take into

consideration data incompleteness and limitations of

available models (Marshall et al., 2014).

5 GIS PLATFORMS AS

PARTICIPATORY

PLATFORMS

Ocean governance must deal with the socio-

ecological system. Even well informed planning

strategies can be ineffective if citizens are not

involved in all phases of understanding, planning and

enforcing. The ‘human dimension’ (Baldwin and

Mahon, 2015) of this process asks for the

development of participatory platforms able to cope

with the scale, the complexity, and the impact of

political decisions. Experts are no longer seen as the

only actors of public policies, but at the most as

moderators of the decision process. A participatory

GIS platform must be able to provide both

understandable and accessible information to

stakeholders, allow easy comparison between

alternative strategies, and so promoting transparency

and collaboration in decision-making (Baldwin and

Mahon, 2015, Strickland-Munro, 2016, Pierre et al.,

2017).

This is an area where novelty is needed, which can

contribute for the development of both marine and IT

literacy.

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BRIEF BIOGRAPHY

Jorge Miguel Alberto de Miranda, President of

IPMA, Full Professor of Geophysics at the University

of Lisbon, former director of Instituto Dom Luiz

(Associate Laboratory) from 2004 to 2011. Member

of the General Council of the University of Lisbon

since 2011. Vice-chairman of the European Center

for Medium Range Weather Forecast. Member of the

Executive Board of WMO RAVI. He studied at the

University of Lisbon, where he graduated in 1981 in

Physics Full Professor since 2011. His research

activity is focused on Marine Geophysics and Natural

Hazards, in particular tsunamis. He is author or co-

author of more than 80 articles published in leading

ISI journals, in particular Journal of Geophysical

Research, Earth and Planetary Science Letters,

Geophysical Research Letters and Nature, with more

than 1100 citations. Corresponding member of the

Lisbon Academy of Sciences.