Maritime Spatial Planning or Integrated Coastal Management – the sticking point for new maritime legislation

Our last issue [vol 10.1] looked in some detail and attempted to review the progress and current status of Integrated Coastal Zone Management, now called Integrated Coastal Management, as it might impact on Ireland.

Our coverage revealed an appalling fact: that seventeen years after politicians first began tinkering with the challenge of agreeing an imaginative and workable legislative architecture for good coastal governance, progress had been at best, patchy, and at worst, mostly ineffectual.

This issue also included in an interview with Dr Ann Marie O’Hagan, an expert on the complex law of coastal management and a regularly-published author on the subject, from Cork’s Beaufort Laboratory. That interview will have left the reader somewhat shell shocked: that our politicians, instead of rolling up their sleeves and engaging honestly with the challenge, had actually avoided and ignored the realities of the subject it was said, for fear of upsetting a plethora of sitting vested interests.

The interview however indicated that our politicians might not be the ones to blame for the lack of progress at all. The problem it seems lies elsewhere. Dr O’Hagan points to Brussels with the assertion that turgid progress towards a workable EU-wide coastal policy might in fact be because instead of Integrated Coastal Management – which was and is strongly environmentally-based – the political preference has shifted towards Marine Spatial Planning (MSP).

Why?

Because MSP is viewed – by developers especially – as one of the essential cross-sectoral tools to maximise economic growth from the ocean.

In this issue, Dr O’Hagan looks in more detail at the complexities involved in producing an EU-wide legislation for coastal management. From this article we learn that ‘a proposal for a Directive establishing a framework for Maritime Spatial Planning and Integrated Coastal Management’ was published in March 2013.

The aim of this Directive ‘is to promote the sustainable growth of maritime and coastal activities and sustainable use of coastal and marine resources by establishing an effective implementation framework’. As the proposed Directive moves slowly through the EU’s legislative process however, 82 amendments have already been tabled. And this comes after the European Parliament first had a reading of the material in December last year.

One of the key sticking points appears again to be around the weighting of the concepts of Maritime Spatial Planning and Integrated Coastal Management. The result is that the proposed Directive is being sent back to the competent committee for ‘re-consideration’ and we can expect to see a vote on the legislative resolution – probably next month.

That might yet prove to be a very optimistic time line. Complex or not, it’s high time that EU Member States come to grips with the legislation necessary to protect its increasingly vulnerable maritime coastal zone.