Marine Spatial Planning Workshop: Balancing social, economic, cultural and ecological objectives
Location: Online
This workshop is the third capacity building activity organised by IMECaN, the Interdisciplinary Marine Early Career Network of IMBeR. This workshop on Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) is designed for approximately 150 early career researchers and professionals and will include presentations and interactive group activities with an interdisciplinary group of scientists from across the globe.
The virtual workshop will run for 3 hours each day. Live talks and discussions will be recorded and made available to participants to encourage participation accross all time zones.
Day 1 : Marine Spatial Planning
17 August 11am - 2pm UTC
Day 2: The missing layers: social, cultural, and ecological objectives
18 August 2pm - 5pm UTC
Day 3: The role of governance
19 August 7am - 10am UTC
Focus of the workshop
Our oceans are almost entirely impacted by different anthropogenic activities such as fishing and mining. To protect marine resources and ecosystems, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the Convention on Biological Diversity set a target to protect 10% of the oceans by 2020 through the establishment of Marine Protected Areas. This target has not been reached and only about 5% of the ocean is currently protected. Protecting a third of the world’s Economic Exclusive Zones by 2030 has been recently established as a new target.
Marine spatial planning (MSP) plays a key role to achieving the effective implementation of this target. MSP aims to ensure the protection of marine resources and biodiversity while managing maritime activities. This highlights the importance of achieving a balance between ecological and economic objectives to achieve sustainable development. Social objectives add another layer of complexity to achieving this balance and have mostly been overlooked in MSP.
To this end, this workshop aims to provide ECRs with a strong theoretical and applied understanding of MSP and the need to balance different objectives using a combination of lectures and interactive activities.
Topics to be covered
- Introduction to Marine Spatial Planning
- Climate change considerations in marine reserves design
- Integrating socio-ecological systems in Marine Spatial Planning
- Role of governance in Marine Spatial Planning
- Ecosystem-based approaches in Regional Fisheries Management Organisations
- MSP case studies from all over the world
Other activities
- Maritime Spatial Planning Challenge 2050
- Decolonization from an indigenous perspective
- Virtual Poster Session
Who can apply
Early career researchers and professionals.
We have reached our limit - 680 people have signed up for the workshop and we are not able to admit any more.
