The European Commission agreed upon the importance of marine spatial planning and urged all the member states to create marine spatial plans that also took neighboring countries into consideration in 2014 (Directive 2014/89/EU, 2014). However, when the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed that 2021–2030 will be the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development – the theme began receiving increased international attention and recognition (Ocean Decade, n.d.). The High-Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy, consisting of 18 sitting Heads of State and Government, presented a new ocean action agenda in 2020 (Ocean Panel, n.d.). This agenda shows that it is a matter of urgency to develop a holistic approach to ocean management across the globe to achieve environmental, economic, and social goals set in the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Ocean Panel, n.d).
The Nordic and Baltic states are facing several challenges in the marine areas that coordinated marine spatial planning can help alleviate. How would for instance restoring kelp forests in Sweden affect hypoxic zones in the Baltic Sea? How does livestock waste or fertilization in rivers affect our fjords? How do wind farms on one side of a national border affect marine mammals on the other side of the border?
However, the way marine spatial planning is organized today deviates across states and is regulated by different legal legislations. There also seems to be a common lack of understanding of marine spatial plans’ vision and intentions, and they are often characterized by short time frames, and consultations with local communities, environmental NGOs, scientists, and public authorities starting too late in the process.
Furthermore, most marine spatial plans are created using near-static data. These data are often downloaded from various authoritative data portals and manually combined in various geographic information systems, while statistics and historical data are compiled from various sources into excel spreadsheets. Sometimes, the data you need is hard to access or evaluate whether it is up to date or not. The data also comes in different formats, making it hard to analyze and see in relation to other datasets.