Planning for Our Oceans' Future

• Author: Kathryn Mengerink
• Position: Ph.D., an attorney and scientist, is Director of the Ocean Program at the Environmental Law Institute, where she combines her marine science and legal expertise to develop law and policy options for implementing ecosystem-based management and coastal and marine spatial planning
• Pages: 42-46

Page 42 ❧ THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM Copyright © 2010, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.

Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, July/August 2010

Planning for

Our Oceans’

Future

No individual tool can single-handedly

support coastal and marine spatial

planning. Rather, state and federal

agencies and tribes will need to build

from existing laws, regulations, and

policies that authorize or require place-

based designations, activity restrictions,

consultation, and permitting procedures

Kathryn Mengerink, Ph.D., an attorney

and sc ientist, is Director of the Ocean

Program at the Environmental Law In-

stitute, where she combin es her marine

science and legal ex pertise to develop

law and policy options for implement-

ing ecosyste m-based managemen t and

coastal and marine spatial planning. ELI

attorneys Jo rdan Diamond and Adam Schem pp contributed to the

writing of this ar ticle.

F rom the Atlantic to the Pacif‌ic to the Gulf

of Mexico to the Great Lakes, the United

States controls over 3.4 million square nau-

tical miles of ocean and coasts. Despite the

size of this area, the wealth of the resources

within it, and the dependence of coastal and inland

states on the ecosystem services it provides, there is

no comprehensive U.S. ocean, coastal, and border

lakes policy or management plan.

Instead, the current federal ocean and coastal

management framework is fragmented and sector-

specif‌ic, with numerous agencies managing dif‌ferent

human uses and activities under a plethora of laws

and regulations. ere are two primary drawbacks

to such an approach. First, although a sector-spe-

cif‌ic framework leads to management of individual

activities, it does not account for the cumulative ef-

fects of all sectors operating in U.S. waters. Failing

to appropriately minimize these ef‌fects threatens

the long-term health and sustainability of marine

ecosystems. Second, single-sector management does

not appropriately address user conf‌lict — it does not

fully consider the ef‌fects of one sector on another nor

lead to rational trade-of‌fs. As human uses of ocean

and coastal resources increase, so do the conf‌licts and

competition among them.

Coastal and marine spatial planning is a tool for

ocean governance. (We’ll call this activity CMSP;

similarly, we’ll use CMS Plans to indicate the results

of CMSP.) It is def‌ined as “a public process of analyz-

ing and allocating the spatial and temporal distribu-

tion of human activities in marine areas to achieve

ecological, economic, and social objectives that are

usually specif‌ied through a political process.”1 CMSP

is designed to prevent ecosystem degradation and

avoid user conf‌licts by building a science-based spa-

tial and temporal CMS Plan for utilization of the ma-

rine and coastal environments.

With the establishment of an Interagency Ocean

Policy Task Force in June 2009, President Obama

took the f‌irst steps toward developing a national

CMSP system. Led by the White House Council on

Environmental Quality, the task force had 90 days

to develop recommendations for a comprehensive

national policy that protects ocean and Great Lakes

ecosystems, including a coordination and implemen-

tation strategy.2 Within 180 days, the task force was

to “develop, with appropriate public input, a recom-

mended framework for ef‌fective coastal and marine

spatial planning,” which “should be a comprehensive,

integrated, ecosystem-based approach.”

In response to this charge, the task force issued its

re s e a r c h a n d Po l i c y sT u d i e s