A Sea Change in Ocean Management
by Jack Rodolico
If you suffered from chronic medical conditions, you would want efficient, thoughtful medical care. But consider a scenario where one doctor monitors your diabetes, another oversees your rheumatoid arthritis, and still others manage your heart arrhythmia and colon cancer.
More detrimental than the illnesses themselves is the poor coordination among your physicians, who treat symptoms reactively without considering how the medications they prescribe interact with other treatments. Your unhealthy body is treated in sections, rather than as a dynamic system.
This jumbled oversight is analogous to federal management of the oceans, coasts and the Great Lakes, claims a 2006 study from Science.
“Separate [management] regimes for fisheries, aquaculture, marine mammal conservation, shipping, oil and gas, and mining are designed to resolve conflicts within sectors, but not across sectors. Decision-making is often ad hoc, and no one has clear authority to resolve conflicts across sectors or to deal with cumulative effects.”
After successful attempts in New England to coordinate management of state waters, the federal government—under presidential executive order—is initiating a new National Ocean Policy. The policy focuses heavily on coastal and marine spatial planning (CMSP) in the nation’s 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone.
The new National Ocean Council (NOC)—responsible for implementing the policy—is composed of the existing heads of 27 federal agencies, departments and offices.
Simultaneously, the Northeast—from New York to Maine, including Vermont — will be responsible for creating one of the nation’s nine Regional Planning Bodies. The planning body will create a coastal and marine spatial plan (CMS Plan) for New England’s waters, a plan that synthesizes information from across sectors by coordinating the public, private and tribal entities that oversee the ocean’s uses.
Although the Northeast’s Regional Planning Body and CMS Plan must be blessed by the federally-run National Ocean Council, the region is being given broad flexibility in creating both. In this way, the federal initiative promises to be a largely bottom-up process.“We live in a reactive world,” according to Betsy Nicholson, the Northeast Lead for NOAA’s Coastal Services Center. She contends CMSP will not change how decisions are made, but will improve coordination among existing agencies in order to more effectively implement existing policies.
For example, it will have no effect on the authority of the New England Fisheries Management Council, or the rules that govern the council. Instead, it would encourage NEFMC to communicate with other state and federal agencies in order to avoid cross-sector conflicts, the types of conflicts that could arise as fishermen see more aquaculture farms, wind and tidal turbines, and offshore sand and gas mines.
“We are trying to get people in the decision-making process more informed by giving them more data,” says Ms. Nicholson.
More data would have been helpful in Rhode Island two years ago, when it took authorities about a year to realize a tidal power leasing project had been dead on arrival.
Grays Harbor Ocean Energy Company hoped to install about 100 tidal turbines near a prime fishing area off Block Island. Concerned fishermen began calling their congressional delegates, recalls Grover Fugate, the executive director of Rhode Island’s Coastal Resources Management Council. The governor’s office, the Department of Environmental Management, the Minerals Management Service, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the National Marine Fisheries Service were all involved before it became apparent that the Navy had submarine lanes going right through the area in question.
“All agencies were geared up,” recalls Fugate, “and as it turns out it was not going anywhere because of a national defense interest.”
“Any effort to coordinate these groups is important,” says Burton Hamner, president of Grays Harbor Company. “We should make what we’ve got better instead of throwing more at the wall and hoping it sticks.” That is exactly what the federal and local process aims to do.
“A CMSP process would put all information on the table before areas were selected for leasing, avoiding this issue of potentially conflicting uses in the future,” says Nicholson. She will be NOAA’s CMSP lead for the Northeast Regional Planning Body.
Spatial planning is not a new idea. It has been attempted abroad in Belgium, China, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Australia’s multiuse management of the Great Barrier Reef is praised as an effective example of thoughtful, forward-thinking management.
The Northeast, too, has been nationally lauded as an example of progressive ocean planning—in fact, state officials from throughout New England were called to Washington to comment on the National Ocean Policy before it was finalized. Massachusetts and Rhode Island are implementing their own marine spatial plans in state waters.
Kathleen Leyden, director of the Maine Coastal Program, thinks a widespread spatial planning process could have similarities to what Mainers saw in the state’s efforts to create demonstration sites for offshore wind energy. Although the selected sites are not without conflict, open forums and stakeholder engagement allowed the state to choose sites that caused the least amount of disagreement.
“We need to have a public process where the public defines the uses of the ocean,” affirms Leyden.
New England has a history of state-federal partnerships in ocean management. One of those partnerships, The Northeast Regional Ocean Council (NROC), is currently acting as an interim Regional Planning Body, helping to outline the desired outcomes of CMSP for the region.
High on the list of desired outcomes is broad-based public and stakeholder participation. NROC is also looking to identify ideal locations for alternative energy development and preservation of critical habitat.
A paucity of data presents a serious barrier to good management. For example, there is no existing map illustrating all uses of the Gulf of Maine. The National Ocean Policy addresses this through a call for better mapping capabilities. In New England, a regional data portal would allow the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, the Massachusetts Ocean Partnership, the Nature Conservancy, Applied Science Associates and the Northeast Regional Association of Coastal Ocean Observing Systems to synthesize currently-partitioned data into integrated maps.
New England’s 10 federally-recognized tribes will have a significant, though still poorly-defined role in the planning process. Although state authorities are awaiting federal leadership, Steve Crawford contends, “It’s not lack of oversight.” As the Environmental Director of the Passamaquoddy Tribe at Pleasant Point, he says tribes are being asked to comment on how they should be included.
“The [Obama] Administration has been trying to do the right thing. They want tribal opinion on how to include the tribes.” Mr. Crawford’s pending nomination to a subcommittee of the National Ocean Council could give Maine’s tribes an influential voice.
When the 112th Congress commences, another loosely-defined component will be clarified: money. President Obama’s unapproved 2011 budget holds heavy funding for CMSP, including $6.7 million for NOAA’s budget and $20 million in competitive grants for the nation’s nine Regional Planning Bodies. No one can say if the Republican-controlled House will be friendly to CMSP.
“I don’t see how we will do this without [federal] funding,” concedes Leyden.
Still, NOAA’s Nicholson is optimistic of spatial planning’s future, regardless of federal dollars. “We are going to move forward.” She points to the fact that many private and state dollars have been raised to advance state-wide marine planning throughout the Northeast. “Everyone has been creative regarding funding—we may have to do the same on a larger scale.”
Regardless of funding and other uncertainties, CMSP is a policy priority. New England’s Regional Planning Body will be formed in less than a year, and the region’s CMS Plan will be certified by the National Ocean Council by 2015. The federal government acknowledges that the nation will be looking to the Northeast for leadership this spring, when workshops throughout the country convene to inform and direct the nine regional planning bodies.
As existing and emerging uses make the ocean a smaller place in years to come, more efficient oversight could ensure better marine stewardship, say spatial planning’s advocates. In other words, no new doctors—just better coordination among the doctors you already have.