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This paper reviews the key developments of ocean management leading up to and over the past decade, especially marine or maritime spatial planning and ecosystem-based management, with an emphasis on the former. From scattered seeds in a few marine places—from early marine spatial analysis and data atlases to the EU Marine Spatial Directive in 2014—MSP has grown to a world-wide movement by governments at various levels to manage comprehensively marine resources in space and time. Early efforts to apply systems thinking to marine planning, especially in oWestern/Northern Europe, have developed an extensive knowledge base of what works and doesn't work based not only on academic theory, but now on practical experience. From a few pioneering examples of the implementation of MSP by 2005, today over 75 countries are experimenting with MSP as a practical approach toward ecosystem-based marine management. The paper begins with a summary of early attempts to map the geography of the sea and to define how planning at sea began to some of the first applications of MSP from 1980 to 2005. Real-world efforts to apply MSP, especially in Western/Northern Europe and North America are identified and described. A few key milestones of MSP—the first international workshop on MSP (2006), the early work of the EC in funding pilot MSP projects in Europe, the EU MSP Directive of 2014, and the second international workshop on MSP in 2017 are noted. Current MSP activities in world regions are summarised and characterised. Finally, a target for MSP outcomes by 2030 and future challenges for MSP are identified.

Planning for marine areas, from coastal to open-ocean regions, is being developed worldwide to foster sustainable ocean management and governance. Over the past decades, significant progress has been made by governments in their thinking about marine spatial planning (MSP). MSP is globally widespread and a topic of increasing importance in the scientific and policy realms. It is currently under development in almost 70 countries, encompassing six continents and four ocean basins. Despite its acceptance and use, development and implementation of MSP still faces a myriad of present and future, conceptual and practical challenges, some of them being more striking and widespread. Here, we highlight seven major challenges that need to be properly addressed so that MSP can truly contribute to a sustainable use of the world's oceans. These include, among others, shortcomings in political and institutional frameworks, stakeholder engagement, encompassing human and social dimensions in MSP, balancing economic development and marine ecosystem conservation, and adapting to global environmental change.

The acceleration of global warming and increased vulnerability of marine social-ecological systems affect the benefits provided by the ocean. Spatial planning of marine areas is vital to balance multiple human demands and ensure a healthy ocean, while supporting global ocean goals. To thrive in a changing ocean though, marine spatial planning (MSP) must effectively integrate climate change. By reviewing existing literature on MSP and climate change, we explore the links between them and with ocean sustainability, highlight management challenges, and identify potential pathways to guide action towards the effective integration of climate impacts in MSP. A review of marine spatial planning literature identifies links with climate change and gaps in the practical integration of both concepts.

Planning of marine areas is being developed worldwide to foster sustainable ocean management and governance. Marine spatial planning (MSP) is a process that aims to organize the use of the ocean space, as well as the interactions among human uses (e.g., fisheries, aquaculture, shipping, tourism, renewable energy production) and between users and the marine environment. Over the past 30 years, significant progress has been made by governments in their thinking about MSP. The MSP is currently under development in over 66 countries (44% of the nations with marine waters), encompassing six continents and four ocean basins, and the interest in MSP continues to grow. While most countries are still in the early phase of their MSP initiatives, others have already approved, implemented, or even revised marine spatial plans for many years. Despite its acceptance and use, development and implementation of MSP still faces several conceptual and practical challenges, from political to institutional, social, economic, scientific, and environmental sources. The present chapter provides a review on all these topics by addressing three main questions: what is MSP and why is it needed; what is the global distribution of MSP around the world, together with its state of development by region; and what are some of the most prominent and widespread challenges, present and future, that are linked to the development of MSP?

Marine spatial planning is a process now employed in more than 60 countries around the world to identify and resolve conflicts among competing uses of ocean space, and to resolve conflicts between human uses and the natural marine environment. Marine spatial planning is often driven by the need to find space for new users—including energy extraction and generation—in increasingly busy seas, and to reduce conflicts in space and time among uses and between use and conservation. Marine spatial planning should be (1) place-based, with a focus on marine spaces that people can understand, relate to, and care about; (2) participatory, building on a broad base of stakeholders to ensure long-term support for management; (3) integrated and multi-objective, including all important economic sectors—and economic and social objectives as well as ecological ones; (4) strategic and future-oriented, considering alternative means to achieve desired future conditions of the marine area; (5) ecosystem-based, with a focus on maintaining ecosystem services over time; and (6) continuing and adaptive, with an emphasis on monitoring and evaluating the performance of management actions, and learning by doing. Good marine spatial planning is a public process done mainly by government, but it should also effectively involve users and stakeholders. While often presented as an overly complicated process, marine spatial planning reduces to four simple questions: (1) Where are we now? (2) Where do we want to be? (3) How do we get there? (4) What have we accomplished? One of its assumptions is that not all areas of the ocean are equally important from an ecological, economic, or social perspective, and many opportunities exist to identify the most important areas and resolve any conflicts among alternative uses (or non-use) of those areas.

Adaptive maritime spatial planning (MSP) uses monitoring and evaluation of the effectiveness of spatial and temporal management measures to promote understanding and improve planning and decision-making. An adaptive approach to MSP involves exploring alternative ways to meet management objectives, predicting the outcomes of alternative management measures, implementing one or more of these alternative management measures, monitoring to learn about the effects of management measures, and then using the results to update knowledge and adjust management actions. A monitoring and evaluation plan should be designed to be both cost effective and comprehensive. The process of setting and assessing performance metrics requires that the ecological and socio-economic objectives of the spatial management plan must be clearly stated up front for management actions to reflect those objectives accurately. To evaluate the effectiveness of a MSP plan, a range of ecological, socio-economic and institutional indicators need to be developed and monitored.

This article summarizes briefly the principal conclusions from papers presented in this special issue on marine spatial planning. It identifies potential economic, ecological, and administrative benefits (and costs) that might be realized from the implementation of MSP. Finally, the article summarize lessons learned and identifies future challenges and directions for MSP, including the development of international guidelines for its implementation.

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This paper discusses the potential contribution of indicators to assess the performance of the governance processes involved in integrated coastal management, focusing on the evaluation phase and the need to complement process-oriented indicators with outcome-oriented indicators to improve adaptive management and accountability. The example of integrated management of marine protected areas is used to propose a menu of indicators of global applicability.

In response to potential commitments and obligations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), many nations are preparing national climate change action plans that identify management strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to the potential impacts of long-term climate change. The successful implementation of these plans and their management strategies within individual countries will depend to a large measure on the extent of their integration into the implementation of other national and sectoral management plans, including coastal management plans. This document provides guidance on integrating coastal management programs and national climate-change action plans.

Driven by outside economic forces and the effects of climate change, the Arctic, its ecosystems, and its people are all faced with substantial change ranging from the loss of ice-dependent species, more intense human uses of the Arctic, and the loss of natural services provided by Arctic ecosystems. In addition to business opportunities, these changes represent new risks to the Arctic’s unique natural environment and to the people who now live and work in the Arctic. Once new human activities begin in the Arctic Ocean, it will be difficult for policymakers and planners to put limits on them. This paper explores a new approach to the integrated management of human activities—marine spatial planning (MSP). MSP seeks to reduce conflicts among human activities and balance the conservation of ecologically important areas with the sustainable development of marine resources in the Arctic. With the exception of Norway, most Arctic governments have been slow to advance marine spatial planning. A way to advance MSP in the Arctic would be to explicitly recognize the importance of moving beyond sole reliance on the initiatives of national governments and towards a pan-Arctic approach to guide the future of the region. Networks and partnerships of non-governmental actors, including indigenous peoples, environmental NGOs, academia, and private industry, all of whom have influence over governmental policies and actions, could be used to initiate MSP across the Arctic.

The NOAA National Status and Trends (NS&T) Program has been monitoring chemical contamination in fish livers, and surface sediments since 1984 and in molluscan tissue and sediments since 1986. Data from fine-grained sediment at 175 sites are used to describe the spatial distribution of contamination throughout the coastal and estuarine United States. Highest levels are generally found in, and considered representative of, urban areas. It should be noted, however, that these levels are not as high as have been found near discharge pipes or in isolated industrial areas through other monitoring efforts. Dramatic biological responses, such as liver tumors in fish or apparently toxic contaminant levels in sediment, are found infrequently. Subtle biological changes, especially those that affect reproductive ability, are being sought. Data from three annual collections of mollusks have been used to identify early signals of temporal trends in contamination at NS&T sites.

Increased development pressures on the marine environment and the potential for multiple use conflicts, arising as a result of the current expansion of offshore wind energy, fishing and aquaculture, dredging, mineral extraction, shipping, and the need to meet international and national commitments to biodiversity conservation, have led to increased interest in sea use planning with particular emphasis on marine spatial planning. Several European countries, on their own initiative or driven by the European Union's Marine Strategy and Maritime Policy, the Bergen Declaration of the North Sea Conference, and the EU Recommendation on Integrated Coastal Zone Management, have taken global leadership in implementing marine spatial planning. Belgium, The Netherlands, and Germany in the North Sea, and the United Kingdom in the Irish Sea, have already completed preliminary sea use plans and zoning proposals for marine areas within their national jurisdictions. This paper discusses the nature and context of marine spatial planning, the international legal and policy framework, and the increasing need for marine spatial planning in Europe. In addition, the authors review briefly three marine spatial planning initiatives in the North Sea and conclude with some initial lessons learned from these experiences.

This section of a two-part report is introduced by Drs Ehler and Basta of NOAA. It deals with operational discharges of oil from marine transportation sources and was compiled by Virgil F. Keith, Robert A. Mondor and Nannette J. Goldberg, of Engineering Computer Optecnomics, Inc., Annapolis, MD 21401, and Charles N. Ehler, Daniel J. Basta and Thomas F. LaPointe of the Ocean Assessments Division, Office of Oceanography and Marine Services, National Ocean Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Rockville, MD 20852. Charles Ehler is the Acting Chief of the division; Daniel Basta is the Acting Chief of its Strategic Assessment Branch. The second part of the report on predicting surface transport of pollutants in the Gulf will form next month's Viewpoint.

This paper describes a first attempt to estimate the spatial and temporal pattern of operational discharges of oil from ships and their contribution to surface oil concentrations in the Gulf of Mexico. A relatively simple—although novel in its application to marine pollution problems—simulation model has been developed to estimate the amount of oil discharged into the gulf routinely and intentionally during normal ship operations. These estimates are entered into a surface pollutant transport model developed to predict “typical” seasonal distributions of surface oil concentrations in the Gulf of Mexico. First results indicate that operational discharges from ships are a major contributor to coastal oil pollution problems throughout the gulf.

Evidence-based decision making is an essential process for sustainable, effective, and efficient marine spatial planning (MSP). In that sense, decision support tools (DSTs) could be considered to be the primary assistant of planners. Although there are many DSTs listed in tool databases, most of them are conceptual and not used in real MSP implementation. The main objective of this review is to: (i) characterize and analyse the present use of the DSTs in existing MSP implementation processes around the world, (ii) identify weaknesses and gaps of existing tools, and (iii) propose new functionalities both to improve their feasibility and to promote their application. In total, 34 DSTs have been identified in 28 different MSP initiatives with different levels of complexity, applicability and usage purposes. Main characteristics of the tools were transferred into a DST matrix. It was observed that limited functionality, tool stability, consideration of economic and social decision problems, ease of use, and tool costs could be considered as the main gaps of existing DSTs. Future developments are needed and should be in the direction of the specific need of marine planners and stakeholders. Results revealed that DST developments should consider both spatial and temporal dynamics of the ocean, and new tools should provide multi-functionality and integrity; meanwhile they should be easy to use and freely available. Hence, this research summarised current use, gaps, and expected development trends of DSTs and it concludes that there is still a big potential of DST developments to assist operational MSP processes.