Managing conflicts and synergies of use-use interactions

With traditional and new human-based uses expanding their uses of marine space, the pressures on ecosystem services are increasing. At the same time, risks for use-use conflicts are increasing. Both use-environment interactions and use-use interactions are thus important to evaluate in maritime spatial planning with the purpose of attempting to increase synergies and to decrease conflicts as part of trade-off analyses processes.
A matrix-based approach to list and rank environmental, socioeconomic, and cultural synergies and conflicts based on use-use interactions will be presented. It will be discussed how use-use interactions can be explored by considering use-use links involving spatial-temporal durations, environmental needs, environmental impacts, gear, and users. The conflicts and synergies of the use-use interactions depend on the spatial-temporal proximity of the uses, for which reason both the horizontal and vertical distributions of the uses as well as the temporal durations of the uses are important. Expert knowledge about potential and/or actual conflicts and synergies can be included, depending on the knowledge degree of different scenarios.
The approach is relevant in the process of evaluating co-location options. However, it will be highlighted how the approach cannot stand alone but can advantageously be combined with other tools for example cumulative environmental impact assessment tools.