The EU’s SEANERGY 2020 project has an overall aim to provide policy, regulatory and planning conditions recommendations that can reduce barriers to the growth of offshore power generation from marine renewable sources. Here we present an extracted comparison of the Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) regimes in 17 EU Member States in relation to offshore renewable energy (O-RE) generation.
The project has developed a set of seven criteria to evaluate the different MSP regimes across the 17 EU Member States. These criteria are: 1) policy and legal framework; 2) data and information management; 3) permitting and licensing; 4) consultation 5) sector conflict management; 6) cross-border cooperation; 7) implementation of MSP.
Based on these criteria, a series of national reports were commissioned to establish the current status of MSP within each EU Member States. These reports go into detail on the specific arrangements within the different countries and provide details on national legalisation, data management, permitting arrangements, consultation mechanisms, methods for managing sector-conflict and cross-border cooperation. They also summarise to what extent MSP is being implemented. These national reports served as basis for a comparative analysis of national MSP regimes according to the seven criteria.
Before going any further in terms of assessing the extent to which existing legal and policy frameworks give effect to MSP it is perhaps useful to examine in more detail what is meant by MSP. An immediate problem in this respect is that there is no internationally accepted definition of MSP. Nor, of course, is there a formal EU definition given that there is no EU legislation on MSP. One broadly accepted definition, which has been proposed by UNESCO Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) is that MSP is: ‘a process of analysing and allocating parts of three-dimensional marine spaces to specific uses to achieve ecological, economic and social objectives that are usually specified through the political process: the process usually results in a comprehensive plan or vision for a marine region. (MSP) is an essential element of sea use management’.
