The ocean is a crowded place. Fishing fleets compete with shipping lanes. Wind farms overlap with marine mammal migration routes. Conservation zones conflict with tourism hotspots. And everyone claims their use is most important.

For decades, ocean planning treated these conflicts as problems to solve through better science or stricter regulations. But researchers working across six marine regions in Europe have taken a different approach: acknowledging that perfect solutions don't exist and instead developing systematic methods for negotiating the inevitable compromises.

Their framework, tested from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean, provides the first comprehensive methodology for what planners call trade-offs, the careful balancing act between protecting marine ecosystems and allowing the economic activities that coastal communities depend on.

Beyond Win-Win Thinking

The idea sounds simple enough: maritime spatial planning should balance human uses with ocean health. In practice, this proves extraordinarily difficult. Win-win solutions, where everyone benefits without sacrifice, are as rare in ocean planning as they are anywhere else. More commonly, protecting one value means compromising another.

Consider a fundamental trade-off that emerged in every region the researchers studied: marine conservation versus economic development. Creating a marine protected area might safeguard biodiversity but restrict fishing grounds that have supported families for generations. Allowing offshore wind development provides renewable energy but might disrupt whale migration patterns.

These aren't simply technical problems amenable to better data or smarter algorithms. They represent genuine conflicts between legitimate interests, each with valid arguments and real stakes in the outcome.

Traditional ocean planning often obscured these conflicts, treating them as inefficiencies to optimize away through scientific analysis. The new approach makes them explicit. By clearly articulating what gets traded for what, the framework improves transparency, helps avoid unnecessary conflicts based on misperceptions, and focuses debate on finding the most efficient solutions.

The Hidden Value of Ecosystem Services

A key insight underlying the methodology involves thinking about oceans not just as resources to extract or spaces to allocate, but as systems providing multiple benefits to people. This concept, called ecosystem services, recognizes that healthy marine environments deliver provisioning services like seafood, regulation services like climate stabilization and water purification, and cultural services like recreation and tourism.

These services aren't independent. Protecting one often affects others in complex ways. A mangrove forest protects coastlines from storms while also serving as nursery habitat for commercially important fish. Damage it for coastal development and you lose both services simultaneously.

Understanding these relationships helps clarify why certain trade-offs matter. If two activities both depend on the same ecosystem service, allowing one at the expense of that service harms both in the long run. Identifying such dependencies can reveal hidden costs of development choices or unexpected benefits of conservation.

The researchers proposed methods for mapping ecosystem services, visually representing where different benefits concentrate and how human activities might affect them. While only one of their six test sites actually implemented this mapping due to data limitations and time constraints, the approach offers a promising tool for making abstract ecosystem concepts concrete and spatially explicit.

Five Types of Ocean Compromise

Through their work across diverse marine environments, from the North Sea to the Black Sea, the researchers identified five fundamental categories of trade-offs that repeatedly emerge in maritime planning.

The most universal involves balancing marine conservation with economic development. Every single test site grappled with this tension. The challenge isn't choosing one over the other but finding sustainable middle grounds where economic activities can continue within ecological limits.

Some regions highlighted trade-offs between short term benefits and long term sustainability. In the Mediterranean, for instance, mitigation measures to reduce ship strikes on marine mammals might impose immediate economic costs on shipping companies. The long term benefit, preserving whale populations and the tourism they attract, accrues over years or decades. Finding the political will to accept near term costs for distant benefits remains perpetually difficult.

Another category involves exclusive versus shared uses of marine space. Does an area get reserved for a single activity, like a military training zone, or opened to multiple compatible uses? The Azores and Bay of Cádiz both struggled with this question, trying to balance access restrictions necessary for conservation with the interests of recreational boaters, traditional fishers, and tourism operators.

Trade-offs between local and regional interests emerged in several sites. Marine mammals don't respect national boundaries. Neither do pollution or climate change impacts. Effective conservation often requires thinking at larger scales than individual communities or even nations prefer, creating tensions between locally beneficial choices and regionally optimal strategies.

Finally, different stakeholders bring incompatible priorities that must be reconciled. Recreational users want access. Conservationists want protection. Commercial interests want profit. Subsistence fishers want survival. No single solution satisfies everyone, so the question becomes whose interests get weighted how heavily in different contexts.

The Power of Participatory Mapping

One of the methodology's most innovative features involves bringing stakeholders together to literally draw their competing visions on maps. Using digital tools like SeaSketch, fishers, conservationists, industry representatives, and government officials could mark areas they considered critical, identify conflicts, and propose boundaries.

This participatory mapping serves multiple functions. It makes implicit knowledge explicit. A fisher might know from decades of experience where juvenile fish congregate in ways no scientific survey has documented. A tourism operator understands seasonal patterns in visitor behavior that don't appear in official statistics. Getting this local knowledge onto maps improves the information base for decisions.

The mapping also clarifies exactly where conflicts lie, moving discussions from abstract principles to concrete geography. It's one thing to say fishing and conservation might conflict. It's another to see on a map that a proposed protected area overlaps precisely with the most productive fishing grounds in the region.

Perhaps most importantly, the collaborative mapping process itself builds trust and understanding among parties who might otherwise view each other as opponents. When stakeholders work together to identify problems and explore solutions, they develop shared language and relationships that persist beyond individual planning exercises.

The researchers found that in-person workshops worked best for this collaborative mapping, though time and resource constraints sometimes necessitated online alternatives. The tool itself, while valuable, proved less important than the process of bringing diverse groups together to engage with spatial information and each other.

Climate Change Complicates Everything

As if balancing current uses weren't challenging enough, maritime planning must also contend with how climate change will reshape ocean conditions. Warming waters shift species distributions. Sea level rise threatens coastal infrastructure. Ocean acidification affects shellfish and coral reefs.

The test sites took two distinct approaches to incorporating climate change into their trade-off analyses. Some used climate models to project future ocean conditions and species distributions. Others asked stakeholders about their perceptions of climate risks and impacts.

Each approach offers advantages. Climate models provide quantitative projections grounded in physical science, helping planners anticipate where marine mammals might shift under warming scenarios or how storm patterns might change. But models contain uncertainties and may not capture local dynamics well.

Stakeholder perceptions, while potentially less scientifically rigorous, reveal how people actually experiencing ocean changes understand what's happening. A fisher who has worked the same waters for 40 years notices shifts in seasonal patterns that academic researchers might miss. These perceptions also matter politically; planning succeeds or fails based partly on whether people believe the projections informing it.

The researchers found that integrating climate change remains one of maritime planning's greatest challenges. The uncertainties are large, the timescales extend beyond typical planning horizons, and the changes might fundamentally alter which trade-offs matter.

From Theory to Practice: Lessons from Six Seas

Testing the methodology across six diverse marine regions revealed both its flexibility and its limitations. Each site adapted the general framework to local circumstances, goals, and constraints.

The Bay of Cádiz focused on addressing conflicts within a nominally protected area that had never been effectively implemented. Despite strategic objectives on paper, lack of enforcement and unclear governance had allowed the marine protected area designation to become meaningless. The trade-off exercise helped stakeholders begin confronting difficult choices about what restrictions might actually be acceptable and enforceable.

The Azores used the framework to support creating an entirely new protected area, gathering stakeholder input on potential conflicts and compatible uses before establishing boundaries. This proactive approach aimed to avoid the Cádiz situation where designation preceded real consensus.

The Belgian North Sea site addressed two distinct issues: proposing a marine reserve while also considering how to protect pelagic biodiversity and manage coastal areas dynamically. The complexity of maritime decision making in this busy, heavily used sea presented challenges, but the structured trade-off discussions provided valuable insights.

In the Western Mediterranean, the focus centered on marine mammal conservation and the risks from maritime traffic. With large cetacean species vulnerable to ship strikes, planners had to weigh traffic restrictions against economic impacts on shipping. A cetacean alert system emerged as a potential compromise, enforcing speed limits only when whales were actually present rather than permanent broad restrictions.

The Black Sea and Baltic Sea sites both examined conflicts around expanding protected area networks, with the Black Sea additionally considering offshore wind farm development. Both highlighted the need for thinking beyond national boundaries, since many ocean issues and uses don't stop at maritime borders.

The Challenge of Stakeholder Engagement

One consistent theme across all sites involved the difficulty of meaningful stakeholder participation. Getting the right people to the table requires identifying not just the obvious major industries but also smaller scale users whose interests might be overlooked. Subsistence fishers, indigenous communities, and recreational users often have less organized advocacy than commercial sectors.

Even when stakeholders participate, the risk of fatigue exists. People have limited time and patience for planning processes, especially if they've seen previous exercises produce little tangible change. Several sites noted that stakeholders needed more time to prepare, to review results, and to develop the digital skills required for online participation.

The cost of participation shouldn't be understated. Meaningful engagement requires financial resources, staff time, and extended preparation periods. It risks authorities losing control of the planning process or powerful interests dominating discussions. But the alternative, top down planning without buy-in, typically fails to achieve real world implementation.

The researchers found that communities of practice, ongoing groups of stakeholders who regularly interact around maritime planning issues, helped sustain engagement over time. Rather than one-off consultations, these communities developed relationships, shared knowledge, and built capacity for collaborative problem solving.

What's Missing: The Data Gap

One surprising finding involved how rarely the ecosystem service mapping component got implemented. Despite its theoretical appeal, most sites skipped it due to lack of appropriate data, insufficient training in geospatial analysis, or time constraints.

This reveals a broader challenge in maritime planning: the persistent gap between conceptual frameworks and available information. High resolution spatial data on marine ecosystems remains scarce compared to terrestrial environments. Understanding how different ecosystem components contribute to services requires expertise many planning teams lack. And validating theoretical models against real world conditions often proves difficult.

The researchers also discovered that even basic information about human uses of marine areas is incomplete. Tourism impacts, illegal fishing activities, and small scale traditional uses often leave no systematic records. Participatory mapping helps fill these gaps by capturing local knowledge, but converting lived experience into quantifiable spatial data brings its own complications.

Recommendations for Future Ocean Planning

Based on their experience across six test sites, the researchers developed detailed recommendations organized around three phases: early decisions, identifying what's negotiable, and supporting the actual decision making process.

Before beginning any trade-off exercise, examine past initiatives to learn from previous successes and failures. Start with simpler issues that fall within existing frameworks rather than immediately tackling the most contentious problems. Carefully choose appropriate stakeholder engagement formats; communities of practice work well in some contexts but not universally.

Select the right digital tools for participatory mapping before starting. The researchers found SeaSketch valuable but noted it works better for data collection and smaller scales than for exploring very large areas. Prepare basemaps and visualization tools in advance so stakeholders can immediately see their inputs reflected spatially.

During negotiations, address illegal activities even though they're difficult to document and discuss. Intensifying surveillance in sensitive zones can indirectly deter such activities. Think about the future of areas currently reserved for uses that might change; military zones, for instance, might eventually become available for other purposes.

Support decisions by improving policy coherence between different regulations affecting oceans. Conduct offshore studies to fill data gaps on marine mammals and other poorly understood species. Expand understanding of how climate change scenarios will affect different uses and ecosystems. Visualize all relevant data layers during discussions so stakeholders can quickly grasp relationships and conflicts.

The Bigger Picture

This methodology represents more than just a technical improvement in ocean planning. It embodies a shift in how we think about managing marine environments.

For too long, ocean governance operated under the assumption that better science would resolve conflicts by revealing optimal solutions. If we just had more data, more sophisticated models, clearer understanding of ecosystem dynamics, then the right answer would become obvious and disagreements would evaporate.

The trade-off framework acknowledges a deeper truth: many ocean conflicts aren't technical problems with scientific solutions. They're value conflicts requiring political negotiation among groups with genuinely different interests and legitimate stakes in outcomes.

Making these conflicts explicit, providing structured processes for discussing them, and developing tools for visualizing alternatives doesn't eliminate disagreement. But it moves debate to more productive ground. Instead of arguing about whose science is better or whose needs are more legitimate, stakeholders can focus on identifying the most efficient compromises that minimize overall harm while distributing costs and benefits as fairly as possible.

The approach also recognizes that ocean planning isn't a one time exercise producing a final optimal arrangement. Conditions change. New uses emerge. Climate impacts accelerate. Effective planning requires adaptive frameworks that can be revisited, revised, and refined as circumstances evolve.

Perhaps most importantly, the methodology provides a pathway for integrating conservation into broader ocean management rather than treating it as separate. Marine protected areas aren't islands isolated from surrounding human activities. They exist within larger seascapes where fishing, shipping, energy development, and recreation all occur. Finding sustainable arrangements requires addressing all these uses together, understanding their interactions, and negotiating trade-offs among them.

As ocean uses intensify globally, from deep sea mining to floating wind farms to expanding aquaculture, the need for systematic approaches to managing conflicts will only grow. The framework developed and tested across European seas offers a model that could be adapted to other regions facing similar challenges of balancing conservation with development, long term sustainability with short term needs, and the competing claims of diverse ocean users.

The ocean may be crowded, but it doesn't have to be chaotic. With structured processes for negotiating the inevitable compromises, transparency about what gets traded for what, and meaningful participation from those affected by decisions, maritime planning can move beyond win-win fantasies toward workable solutions that, while imperfect, represent genuine progress toward sustainable ocean stewardship.

Publication Details

Published online: March 6, 2025
Journal: npj Ocean Sustainability
Publisher: Springer Nature
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44183-025-00109-6

Credit and Disclaimer

This article is based on original research published in npj Ocean Sustainability by scientists from the University of the Azores, the Marine and Environmental Sciences Centre, and the University of Algarve. The content has been adapted for general audiences while maintaining complete scientific accuracy. Readers are strongly encouraged to consult the full research article for comprehensive technical details, complete datasets, detailed methodologies, experimental protocols, and supplementary information via the DOI link provided above. All scientific findings, data, and conclusions presented here are derived directly from the original publication, and full credit belongs to the research team and their institutions.