Supporting integrative maritime spatial planning by operationalising SEANERGY – a tool to study cross-sectoral synergies and conflicts

With growing pressures on marine ecosystems and on marine space, an
increasingly needed strategy to optimise the use of marine space is to
co-locate synergic marine human uses in close spatial–temporal
proximity while separating conflicting marine human uses. The ArcMap
toolbox SEANERGY is a new, cross-sectoral spatial decision support tool
(DST) that enables maritime spatial planners to consider synergies and
conflicts between marine uses to support assessments of co-location
options. Cross-sectoral approaches are important to reach more
integrative maritime spatial planning (MSP) processes. As this article
demonstrates through a Baltic Sea analysis, SEANERGY presents a crosssectoral use catalogue for MSP through enabling the tool users to
answer important specific questions to spatially and/or numerically
weight potential synergies/conflicts between marine uses. The article
discusses to what degree such a cross-sectoral perspective can support
integrative MSP processes. While MSP integrative challenges still exist,
SEANERGY enables MSP processes to move towards developing shared
goals and initiate discussions built on best available knowledge
regarding potential use-use synergies and use-use conflicts for whole
sea basins at once.