From MARine Ecosystem Accounting to integrated governance for sustainable planning of marine and coastal areas

The ecosystem-based approach is a strategy for the integrated management of land, water and living resources that promotes their conservation and sustainable use in an equitable way. EBA is a cornerstone of many EU directives but to date there is no clear guidance on how to implement it in practice for instance, in maritime spatial planning processes. Ecosystems are linked to human well-being through the flow of ecosystem services, i.e., the benefits the marine environment and its resources deliver to society. These include, for instance, the production of economically exploitable biomasses (e.g. fish) but also regulating services that sustain the environment, such as climate and seawater quality. A weak integration of ecology and economy results in a disconnection of economic analysis from the functioning of ecosystems. Current valuation approaches hardly capture the cumulative impact of different human activities on ecosystem services, thereby failing in the achievement of sustainable use of natural resources. Therefore, novel assessment methodologies, which are more adequate to reflect the complexity of natural and human systems interactions, are needed to further develop joint and integrated governance among MSP, MSFD and other integral regional strategies concerning the Baltic Sea. The main result of the MAREA will be (1) the realisation of a system of accounting of marine environment and the benefits these deliver, also in terms of regulating services for climate and ecosystems’ sustainability, and (2) a connected model of integrated sustainable governance for use of natural resources and marine space. A key aspect of the project is the involvement of key stakeholders in the Central Baltic region. The ecosystem accounting models as well as the Sustainability Compass are generated and updated through participatory learning including key stakeholders: authorities responsible for MSP and marine management planning, environmental experts and general public.R2.2. Share of marine and coastal areas with improved managementThe main results of the project are:
1) A framework for describing the marine ecosystem services produced in a specific area.
2) A model and a framework combining the ecosystem services concept with marine ecosystem accounting in an operationally relevant spatial scale.
3) Development of Sustainability Compass in marine context to study the realisation of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in the pilot cases.
4) Development of geospatial tool to enable easy access to integrated data and analyses. All of the main results provide a possibility to increase further the share of coastal and marine areas with improved management by providing an opportunity for more integrated assessment of nature capital and the consequences of its use and by developing tools to monitor the impacts of management decisions on the marine environment.