8. Marine spatial planning in the age of climate change

Catarina Frazão Santos, Tundi Agardy, and Elena Gissi, extend the approach of managing marine ecosystems to include full cross-sectoral marine spatial planning (MSP), which has been in intensive development for just over 20 years. This approach goes beyond protection for biodiversity to spatial planning for conservation as well as all human uses, initially in the EEZs of nations. This approach to spatial planning is well established on land, but more recently applied to the sea. Over the last 20 years, MSP has been elaborated to some degree in about 80 countries. But one limitation has been that the spatial plots have been static (as on land). MSP in the age of climate change requires much more dynamic thinking because marine habitats, organisms, and the people who use them move around with variation in ocean climate. Current work led by this group is seeking to extend thinking around climate-ready MSP to the open sea (outside EEZs where governance is more certain)—in the Southern Ocean.