Plan4Blue

Title: Maritime Spatial Planning for Sustainable Blue Economies

Summary: The Plan4Blue project promotes sustainable planning and management of marine and coastal areas of Gulf of Finland and Archipelago Sea by developing Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) capacity with an emphasis on cross-border aspects. Presently cross-border collaboration in MSP is not active in the project area.

The project tackles the expected growth of maritime sectors to find a balance between economic, social and environmental goals. Because many of the economic activities and their impacts cross borders, planning and management requires cross-border collaboration between stakeholders and authorities. The project responds directly to goals of the programme by developing capacity in cross-border MSP in order to ensure sustainable use of common resources. Project facilitates collaboration of stakeholders and authorities to find cross-border solutions for sustainable planning and management of marine and coastal areas.

The project focuses on cross-border aspects, but addresses also national and county levels as appropriate. The result will help to improve management of one marine area (Gulf of Finland) and six coastal areas as defined in the programme manual.

The project’s main outputs are:

• Agreement on cross-border MSP objectives,
• Planning solutions and framework for continuous collaboration jointly produced blue growth scenarios,
• Spatial analysis of potentials and risks of blue growth,
• Guidelines for multidisciplinary analyses and stakeholder process to support MSP,
• The outputs benefit the spatial planning authorities, managers and also economic actors

Cross-border MSP is novel for the area. Facilitation of a participatory process to identify sustainable solutions for blue growth creates new collaborations in the project area. Using the concept of ecosystem services as an integrative concept to bridge multidisciplinary analyses is novel aspect in MSP.

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