Gunfleet Sands Offshore Wind Farm Photo by Ashley Dace
Industries all want a piece of the Earth’s oceans—for shipping, tourism, fishing, energy development. The result is an ad hoc, first-come, first-served mess, where one use, say oil drilling, may set up shop in a location that might better be reserved for another use, such as fishing or tourism. These same sorts of issues, if they happened on land, might be resolved by a comprehensive land use plan that would take into account the best uses of the land in question for the interested parties and, perhaps most important, for the community at large.
On the ocean, comprehensive ocean planning is also called marine spatial planning (MSP). Sarah Chasis, the director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Ocean Initiative, says that the U.S. economy can benefit from MSP, and blogs about an example, a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that looks at optimal siting for a wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts. The study’s authors claim that taking into account other uses as well as habitat and ecosystem preservation when choosing a site for the wind farm will add more than $10 billion in extra value to the energy sector while saving the fishery and whale-watching sectors more than $1 million in losses.
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