Framing marine spatial planning: Future orientation and innovation as steps to success for global cooperation and sustainability

Marine spatial planning focuses on reconciling multiple uses of marine resources and space of oceans, seas and coasts which form an integrated and essential component of the Earth's ecosystem, and are critical to achieving global sustainable growth. For example, coasts are the intersection where people and their prosperity from oceans and seas come together. Over three billion people depend on coasts and their resources: thirteen of the world's 20 megacities are coastal, a testament to their importance for national and global socioeconomic well-being and growth. However, coasts are also some of the most vulnerable areas to environmental and climate change, and human pressures. Today, there is no area of the global ocean that remains untouched by human activity. International efforts, such as aspirational global goals including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the COP21 Paris agreement, call for progress to be made towards a more resilient and sustainable future worldwide. Buy-in to these agreements and conventions achieved internationally infers that using their associated goals and targets as framing drivers for Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) is a next logical step. This chapter analyses the need to ensure MSP processes feed into existing global frameworks, not only to increase relevancy and legitimacy, but also to guarantee that scientific data generated from MSP efforts feed into the broader political, institutional, and policy landscapes. In addition, this chapter explores the possibilities for incorporating additional techniques and tools into the MSP process in order to enhance utility and ownership at scale. The use of techniques such as future scenarios and remote sensing as innovations, or extensions, to typical MSP processes currently in practice, are proposed.