The uniform blue of maps does not show the invisible borders that now divide the sea. The high seas are not so much affected, but coastal waters and continental shelves are exploited more and more, for fishing, agriculture, industry or recreation. These vast areas off our coasts were used for years to dump household rubbish, chemical pollutants and other waste. Today they are reservoirs of natural resources, exploited for economic gain.
Human marine activity increased at an unprecedented rate in the later 20th century, with the growth of maritime trade, offshore exploitation of hydrocarbons, wide use of shipping containers, development of marine aquaculture and offshore wind farms, then marine power in the 2000s. Besides traditional activities (fishing, navigation, granulate extraction, dredging of ports), new developments include ultra-deep drilling and soon the extraction of polymetallic nodules (rocky concretions rich in minerals such as manganese, silicon and cobalt). Exclusive economic zones (EEZs) — coastal belts of up to 200 nautical miles (370km) — remain under state jurisdiction, but more and more exploration and exploitation concessions are being granted to private enterprises. Brice Trouillet, a geographer at the University of Nantes, records a ‘trivialisation of marine space’. Is it now necessary to divide the ocean into zones with different uses, and institutionalise its development? A 2014 EU directive exhorts member states to initiate a planning process, to run from September 2016 to 2021.
Zoning has contradictory effects: it undermines the tradition of freedom of the seas defended by the jurist and philosopher Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) in his Mare Liberum of 1609 (1) and facilitates the gradual appropriation of strategic space with a high market value; but it also resolves an intractable problem.
In 2005 the countries bordering the Baltic Sea, usually cooperative, clashed over the proposed route of the Nord Stream gas pipeline, from Vyborg in Russia to Greifswald in Germany. It was to pass close to the Swedish island of Gotland: to the north was a marine protected area; to the southeast an area where second world war and cold war chemical weapons had been dumped; and all around the island were fish farms. Now the protagonists are applying the lessons from 2005 to Nord Stream 2 — a new pipeline to be built by a consortium involving Russia’s Gazprom and five European enterprises — following a parallel route. Maritime spatial planning is a useful tool, given the increased complexity of development projects.
Laura Melne, communication manager for the intergovernmental cooperation network Vision and Strategies Around the Baltic Sea (Vasab), says Nord Stream was a founding moment. ‘We had to agree on the route. We were also facing the prospect of new wind farms being built in the Baltic, which meant we had to work together to anticipate future conflicts of use.’Zoning aims to optimise the use of space — just like development planning on land — by dividing it into roughly defined zones and assigning them specific qualities (types of activity, regulations, prescriptions). Maritime spatial planning differentiates and sometimes separates uses, which leads to specialisation to avoid incompatibilities and conflicts.
Nearing capacity
There’s a shortage of space in the Baltic. The sea is almost completely enclosed, measures only 450,000 sq km (a sixth of the size of the Mediterranean) and is bordered by nine countries, including Germany and Russia (2), the world’s fourth and tenth largest economies in 2015. The Baltic is nearing capacity: it carries 8% of the world’s maritime trade and is crowded, especially in the Danish straits, with car ferries, container vessels, cruise ships, fishing boats, and wind farms; below the surface are submarine cables, pipelines, wrecks and wind turbine masts. Lithuania’s EEZ, one of the world’s smallest at 7,031 sq km, is severely restricted in its development potential: there are Natura 2000 protected areas along the coast, the Curonian Spit (listed as a world heritage site by Unesco) and the ecosystems of its lagoon to the south, two military zones with restricted access at its centre, and a dangerous chemical munitions dumping site to the west (see map).
The Klaipėda port authority plans to extend its deepwater port by 2018 (3), which will mean more dredging and new landfill sites close to the coast. Lithuania has decided to raise the proportion of its energy needs met by renewables to at least 20% by 2025, and plans to build two wind farms with an output of 800 megawatts (two-thirds of the output of a reactor at its planned nuclear power plant Visaginas 1). A map of the EEZ makes it possible to identify potential investment zones, attract investors, avoid disputes and limit economic and environmental risks.
Between 2007 and 2013, trial projects co-financed by the EU were launched in eightpilot planning zones, some covering part or all of a state’s EEZ (Lithuania and Latvia), others at the intersection of national jurisdictions (Bay of Pomerania). These experiments are a response as much to geopolitical ambitions as to a will to further economic development. Karmenu Vella, EU commissioner for the environment, maritime affairs and fisheries, says: ‘Coherent planning ensures the legal securityof investors in the blue economy. They need transparency, efficiency, predictability and stability.’
The target sectors are the cruise industry, wind power, short-haul transport, aquaculture and blue biotechnology (4). Brussels suggests there could be benefits of €500m to €3.2bn for European economies, in reduced transaction costs and increased investment in aquaculture and wind power (which provides 58,000 jobs today; the European Commission hopes this will rise to 200,000 by 2020 and 300,000 by 2030). Representatives of pressure groups such as Ocean Energy Europe and the European Wind Energy Association (now WindEurope) played a large part in the drafting of the directive on maritime spatial planning.
The Baltic, shallow and almost entirely enclosed, is highly sensitive to pollution. Will zoning promote the creation of sanctuaries to protect maritime space, even if that means abandoning the rest to intensive exploitation? The first pilot projects show that the most restrictive level of zoning is rarely implemented, even to protect the environment. In the Bay of Pomerania, some zones are exclusively dedicated to wind energy, but it is prohibited everywhere else. Fishing, tourism, sand and gravel extraction, and conservation under Natura 2000 regulations, have reserved zones in which they do not have absolute priority, but are given ‘particular attention’ over other uses. Only national parks are classed as priority areas, and activities that clash with conservation objectives are prohibited.
Blue charity business
A 2012 report on the blue charity business (5) provoked a major controversy over private foundations (such as the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation) concerned with environmental issues, being involved in research on maritime spatial planning, notably for Unesco. According to the report’s authors, who have examined the boards of these foundations in detail, ‘it is reasonable to assume that [private foundations] supporting environmental non-governmental organisations todayarenot completely neutral regarding offshore oil interests, or the supply of rare earth metals to high-tech industries.’ They note that foundations tend to focus their criticisms on over-fishing and are more ambiguous about offshore hydrocarbon exploitation. Activities not easily limited to a particular area, or involving areas with fluctuating limits, such as fishing, lose out in this kind of grid-drawing exercise, despite their critical importance to coastal populations.
This detachment may perhaps be explained by the cold, machine-guided economic rationalism that determines the choice of zones. Algorithms generated by a computer program (Marxan) are supposed to determine the best site for a wind farm or an oilfield, on the basis of initial infrastructure costs, return on investment (factoring in wind speed and frequency, distance from existing cablenetworks) and risks of conflict (with bird and mammal migrations, or tourist activities). Various scenarios are put forward after all the factors have been taken into account. Brice Trouillet says: ‘The political aspect is ignored. What is the purpose of planning? Is the idea that the sea should be productive? Implementing concrete measures without a real overall strategy is tricky.’
As on land, spatial planning at seais not free from territorial egoism. Planning for the Bay of Pomerania reveals countries are out of step. The German state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, a popular tourist destination (tourism generates 11% of its GDP), has already drawn up a plan for its territorial waters (12 nautical miles, just over 22km) with very stringent limits on the building of wind farms, which must be at least 15km offshore. These measures would force other states to accept, within the joint planning framework, the creation of a number of wind farms outside German territorial waters. Several generations of plans and legislative levels are superimposed. ‘The problem is that every country is at a different stage in the planning process,’ says Melne, referring to an EU project she is leading within the Vasab network. ‘So while some have already approved plans, others are only beginning their initial studies,which makes cooperation at regional level very difficult.’
The aim of maritime spatial planning is to create a map of the entire Baltic, but this could revive boundary disputes: at sea, the limits of sovereignty are sometimes still vague. Parts of the Bay of Pomerania planning zone, bordered by Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Poland, are disputed by Poland and Denmark (the waters south of the island of Bornholm) and by Germany and Poland (the northern approach to the ports of Świnoujście and Szczecin). Another problem is the presence of Russia in the Gulf of Finland and the Kaliningrad enclave. Russia, not part of the EU, is regularly accused of incursions into its neighbours’ territorial waters.
The 2014 directive, which EU member states still have to write into their own legislation, does not specify how it should be applied, or the geographic area to which it applies. In France, it may conflict with prior EU and national injunctions, leading to greater complexity or even imposing the traditional territorial layer cake (France’s many levels of local government: regions, departments, arrondissements, cantons, communes) on the sea. But the difference between land and sea is clear: the law of the sea is still evolving, and many legal ambiguities persist, making it easier to defend rights acquired and conquer further rights.
