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by Erin Loury
Last week marked a major victory for the ocean in Washington, D.C. On July 19th, President Obama signed an Executive Order that establishes a National Policy for the Stewardship of the Ocean, Our Coasts, and the Great Lakes, and lays the groundwork for a sustainable future of ocean management and conservation.
“Until now, there has been no cohesive, strategic vision for where the country is going with respect to ocean health and ocean resource management,” said Matthew Armsby an Early Career Fellow with the Center for Ocean Solution’s (COS) marine spatial planning team. “We’ve had many different laws and policies, but the nation’s resource managers lacked a meaningful prioritization of ecosystem health and sustainability.”
The Executive Order adopts the Final Recommendations of the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force, also released on July 19th after a year of research and deliberation (pdf). The Order and Recommendations highlight the importance of ecosystem health and biological diversity to human well-being, acknowledge the threats of climate change and ocean acidification, and call for the implementation of comprehensive coastal and marine spatial planning.
Marine spatial planning (MSP) is a comprehensive information-gathering and decision-making process that balances multiple human uses in the marine environment while protecting ecosystem health and services. Melissa Foley, also an Early Career Fellow with the MSP team at COS, said that a major success of the national ocean policy is its foundation on ecosystem-based management, with clear guidelines for application to the ocean. “People have talked about ecosystem-based management for many years, but nobody has figured out what that means on the water,” she said. “Now the National Ocean Policy presents coastal and marine spatial planning as one tool for implementing ecosystem based management.”
Advancing the MSP dialogue through comment, conferences, and guiding ecological principles
MSP has been a major initiative for COS since the Center’s inception, and also featured prominently in the shaping of the national ocean policy. On June 12, 2009, President Obama issued a memo (pdf) to heads of executive departments and Federal agencies that established the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force, and charged it with developing two things: a national ocean policy, and a framework for coastal and marine spatial planning.
When the Task Force released its interim ocean policy report (pdf) and MSP recommendations (pdf) for public comment in fall of 2009, the MSP team at COS submitted extensive comment letters to share insight and advice from their experiences developing recommendations for MSP in California. “A lot of the questions you need to answer for California are very similar to questions you would need to answer for the United States as a whole,” said Armsby, who works on the MSP team. “California is a very big state that has a diversity of ecosystems and political preferences among the north, central and south coasts. We also have a big family of state agencies that make decisions, although not always talking well with each other, and a fair amount of smaller-scale local governance.” Both California and the United States need to figure out how to plan and make cooperative decisions at a number of different scales, he said.
The COS team had also been developing “ecological principles” that they hoped would be incorporated into any state and federal MSP policies. The MSP team and COS-associated researchers recently published a paper titled “Guiding ecological principles for marine spatial planning” in the journal Marine Policy. “It’s important to outline specific indicators of ecosystem health to give managers something concrete to look at, instead of some arbitrary ecosystem health standard,” said Foley, who is lead author of the paper. These specific indicators include the diversity of native species, the diversity and complexity of habitats, populations of key species, and connectivity.
Armsby said that sharing the ecological principles with the Task Force “fell right within our mission to bring science and policy together.” The team was pleased that these ecological principles were included in the Task Force’s final recommendations, under a section regarding objectives, performance measures, and guidance for MSP.
COS has also advanced the dialogue about ocean governance and marine spatial planning at both state and national levels by participating in workshops and working groups around the country, and by giving presentations and organizing panels at major conferences such as AAAS, Capitol Hill Oceans Week, and the Coastal Zone ’09 conference. COS Executive Director Meg Caldwell testified before Congress in the fall of 2009 on the importance of a national ocean policy.
Julie Packard, Executive Director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, one of three partner organizations that comprise COS, has also encouraged the new ocean policy through her work with the Pew Oceans Commission, along with Aquarium trustees Jane Lubchenco, Leon Panetta and Pietro Parravano. In 2003, the Commission issued its recommendations for a comprehensive overhaul of national ocean policy. Packard has continued to advance those issues as a member of the Joint Oceans Commission Initiative, and recently advocated for ocean policy reform during Capitol Hill Ocean Week, where the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation honored her with a Lifetime Achievement Award for her leadership and commitment to the ocean.
Charting a new course for conservation and sustainable use
At the heart of the new ocean policy is the charge to protect, maintain and restore the health of our ocean, coastal, and Great Lakes ecosystems and resources. The policy states that the purpose of such stewardship of the marine environment is to sustain ocean and coastal economies, preserve maritime heritage, respond to the threats of climate change and ocean acidification, and support national security and foreign policy. Both President Obama’s Executive Order and the Task Force’s Final Recommendations invoke the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the environmental crisis in the Gulf of Mexico as “a stark reminder of how vulnerable our marine environments are, and how much communities and the Nation rely on healthy and resilient ocean and coastal ecosystems.”
The Executive
Order creates a National
Ocean Council (NOC) to strengthen ocean governance and coordinate the maze
of laws and regulations that currently comprise our ocean resource management
system. The NOC will include the NOAA Administrator, the Secretaries of
cabinet-level federal agencies, and a number of senior advisors to the
President on issues such as national security, energy, and climate change. A
major priority for the NOC will be the coordination and implementation of
coastal and marine spatial planning. This comprehensive, ecosystem-based, and
adaptive planning process will chart a course for the conservation and
sustainable use of our oceans, coasts and Great Lakes.
Foley said that having an ocean policy on the national stage broadens the relevance of the COS research agenda and programs, such as a series of “decision support tool” workshops that COS will be organizing for marine managers in the fall. Arsmby expressed hope that this national policy will spark increased interest in California MSP efforts, in part because California has long been interested in ecosystem-based management, and also because the national policy indicates that MSP on the West Coast will take place in both federal and state waters. California can set an example by applying the best possible science and new management tools to inform an ecosystem-based approach to MSP. “Hopefully California will rise to the occasion and take a leadership role in showing how MSP works on the West Coast,” Armsby said.
