A Proposed Framework for Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning in the United States

Our ocean, coasts, and Great Lakes should be vibrant, healthy, and productive. When they are, they provide places for anglers, boaters, beach lovers, divers, and others to enjoy the bounty and beauty of our waters and shores. They provide critical ecological benefits, while supporting important human activities such as maritime commerce and shipping, energy production, and national security. These diverse uses of the ocean—whether as a source of extractable resources, as a place to recreate, as a location to conduct commerce or facilitate national security, or as a place of spiritual renewal—all share one thing in common. Each ultimately occurs in a specific place managed by local, state, federal, or tribal governments using a variety of existing legal authorities. The decisions we make now as a society about how to use those areas will profoundly, and perhaps irreversibly, determine what kind of ocean, coasts, and Great Lakes we pass on to future generations. Today’s world, however, is not as simple as it once was. Human uses of the ocean, coasts, and Great Lakes are growing rapidly. The expansion of existing ocean uses and the emergence of new ones, such as renewable energy, pose significant challenges to our traditional approach to ocean management. The current singlesector or use-by-use approach to ocean management is often illequipped to address the complexities of multiple-use management. Particularly challenging is our relative inability to consider interactions among ocean uses and their combined effects on ecosystem functions that cut across jurisdictional bounds. The result has been increasing depletion and disruption of the nation’s coasts and ocean, and increasing conflicts among its users.