Virginia Marine Resource Bulletin
Volume 42, Number 2, Summer 2010
By Margaret Pizer
A couple of years ago, the terms ocean zoning and marine spatial planning evoked a visceral negative reaction from most people in marine industry.
“Their view was, ‘This is a plot by the environmental community. They’re just putting a new spin on wanting to close off the ocean—we won’t be allowed to do anything, and it’s going to be the end of ocean uses,’” said Morgan Gopnik, a marine policy expert who spoke at Virginia Institute of Marine Science in May as the Virginia Sea Grant Visiting Scholar. But Gopnik and a cadre of other policy makers and planners are beginning to turn the tide of opinion on marine spatial planning.
Marine spatial planning addresses conflicts over the use of marine and coastal resources and identifies compatible uses. Typically, the planning process includes (1) bringing together representatives of a wide variety of groups with an interest in an area; (2) mapping current and potential future ocean uses, habitats, and characteristics; (3) discussing conflicts and compatibilities; and (4) agreeing on a management plan.
“The first thing that people need to understand—right off the bat—is that this is not a tool to promote any one particular use of the marine environment,” says Laura McKay, director of the Virginia Coastal Zone Management (CZM) Program, which is funding several marine spatial planning efforts in Virginia and the Mid Atlantic region. “It’s a tool to coordinate those uses and to ensure that all of the uses that the public wants are carried out in appropriate locations and in a way that promotes the sustainability of the marine system.”
National and State Efforts
Marine spatial planning efforts have been underway for about 20 years in Europe and are well established in New Zealand and Australia, but they have been less prevalent in the United States. Now federal government initiatives are combining with local interest to create momentum for marine spatial planning activities at national, regional, and local levels.
President Obama and Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), have identified marine spatial planning as one of their highest marine policy priorities. On July 19, the President signed an executive order establishing a National Ocean Council. This order also directs federal agencies to “participate in the process for coastal and marine spatial planning and comply with Council certified coastal and marine spatial plans.”
The new National Ocean Council will establish guidelines for marine spatial planning at the regional level, where numerous multistate councils have been set up to work on ocean issues. The Mid Atlantic Regional Council on the Ocean (MARCO) was established in 2009 by agreement among the governors of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. A central component of MARCO is the creation of a regional portal for spatial information. The portal will bring together data on a wide variety of marine and coastal resources, environmental conditions, and human activities, enabling managers, planners, and the public to make customized maps of coasts and offshore waters. The Virginia CZM Program has funded The Nature Conservancy to create an online regional system similar to CZM’s Coastal Geospatial Education Mapping System (GEMS), which houses maps and data about activities and resources in Virginia waters. (CZM’s Coastal GEMS can be accessed at www.deq.state.va.us/coastal/coastalgems.html.)
CZM’s McKay explains that these tools allow anyone to visualize established uses and help resource managers plan future uses that are equitable and sustainable. “Marine spatial planning is providing everyone a fair opportunity to have a voice in what kind of uses are appropriate where,” she says. “Letting things go on the way they are is just begging for more conflict and more degradation.”
With that attitude in mind, officials at state agencies in Virginia have also begun targeted efforts to use marine spatial planning tools to address siting and use-conflict issues. In 2009, for example, the state legislature ordered the Virginia Marine Resource Commission (VMRC) to evaluate opportunities for wind energy development in state waters. The commission used many principles of marine spatial planning, including working with stakeholders and analyzing use conflicts with the aid of detailed maps. The resulting report classifies the degree of impact wind turbines would have on existing uses, such as commercial and recreational fishing, and resources, such as birds, marine mammals, and oyster grounds. The commission determined that none of the state waters (within three miles of shore) would be ideal for large-scale wind development, but according to VMRC’s Tony Watkinson, the report could be used by some coastal communities as they seek to develop community-scale wind projects in local waters.
Watkinson points out that elements of marine spatial planning—mapping marine activities and using those maps to plan for the future—have been going on at VMRC and other agencies for years. “We’ve just not used the term,” he says.
Virginia Sea Grant Director Troy Hartley agrees. “What is truly unique and innovative in the latest discussions is the promotion of a comprehensive view that simultaneously considers multiple sectors (for example, recreational activities, maritime industries, the energy sector, public access and use, conservation, and restoration) and seeks to understand both competing uses for the same space and where opportunities might arise by planning and staging uses in time and space.”
Acting Locally
One of the most exciting recent developments in marine spatial planning in Virginia comes from Gloucester and Mathews Counties. In 2007, with help from the Virginia Sea Grant and Virginia CZM Program, the Middle Peninsula Planning District Commission (MPPDC) convened a group to consider the future management of their waters. The York River Use Conflict Committee brought together a wide range of stakeholders—from commercial fishermen to marina owners and from duck hunters to conservation groups and state agency representatives. “We spent probably the next year and a half just getting folks to understand the concept of what marine spatial planning is,” says Lewie Lawrence, Director of Regional Planning for the MPPDC. “Then we began to explore what tools the General Assembly has granted to local government to help deal with marine spatial planning.”
The committee released seven recommendations for Gloucester County, including recommendations that the County should define a Coastal Living Policy, map and delineate its territorial boundaries in the water, and support and plan for working waterfront infrastructure and public access to the water. The Coastal Living Policy “articulates the value system of a coastal community: that workboats start up early in the morning, that commercial crab pots smell when they’re left out on the deck of a boat… that we’re going to keep it that way because it’s our coastal cultural identity,” says Lawrence. He explains that defining local jurisdictions in the water empowers local government to become more active in managing its waters and to identify specific tools at its disposal to do that.
Since the Use Conflict Committee completed its report in 2008, all seven recommendations have been adopted by the Gloucester County Board of Supervisors, and most have been incorporated into the comprehensive planning processes of both Mathews and Gloucester Counties. In 2009, Mathews County took the Committee’s recommendations as a jumping off point for a unique project: an underwater aquaculture business park.
“We asked all the industry folks, ‘Tell us about your business model and where your problems are, and then let us as the planners think about how public policy can be changed to help fix your problems,’” says Lawrence. With those issues in mind, Mathews County officials are hoping to purchase the rights to a large underwater area where they can establish the infrastructure and policies necessary to make the area an “aquaculture enterprise zone.”
The project is generating excitement within the aquaculture industry and among policy makers who see it as a testing ground for innovative planning at the local scale. “We’re the only Virginia planning district commission that’s actively doing anything with [marine spatial planning] in the Bay,” says Lawrence. “It’s happening in earnest at the local level right here on our coast.”
It’s also happening on the Atlantic coast, or “Seaside,” of Virginia’s Eastern Shore. The Virginia CZM Program has been funding a multiyear Seaside Special Area Management Plan (SAMP) since 2008. This project is taking a marine spatial planning approach to determining best locations for various uses in a dynamic environment where habitat types can shift after every major storm and barrier islands are rolling toward the mainland. Clam aquaculturists, habitat restoration specialists, recreationists, conservationists, and resource managers are working together to map current and potential future resources and uses. Ultimately, they hope to create a holistic management plan that will maximize the economic and ecological vitality of the Seaside.
This is the kind of progress that Morgan Gopnik and other marine policy experts have been working toward. “We held a series of meetings with industry representatives over the course of the last two years, trying to explain what marine spatial planning is,” says Gopnik, “that it’s not meant to close off the ocean—it’s meant to create balance—and that they’d be involved as stakeholders.”
Industry members had a number of important and legitimate concerns and articulated their goals for marine spatial planning—the need for clearly agreed upon objectives, maximum use of existing regulatory bodies rather than additional bureaucracy, and zoning for multiple, compatible uses instead of restricting areas to a single use.
Whether it’s at the national, regional, state, or local level, acceptance of marine spatial planning seems to be growing among industry representatives, regulators, scientists, and policy makers. After two years of talking to industry leaders about marine spatial planning, Gopnik reports, “We’ve definitely seen a shift in attitudes.”
