Developing marine SDI to facilitate marine administration - the spatial dimension

Abstract

The coastal zone is a unique geologic, ecological and biological domain of vital importance to a vast array of terrestrial and aquatic life forms - including humankind. Managing the plethora of rights, restrictions and responsibilities of resources within the marine environment and at the littoral zone has created one of the world’s most complex areas of management. Evidently effective administration and management of these areas to meet the economic, social and environmental objectives of sustainable development is required.

Until recently spatial information management and administration tools have focussed on the terrestrial environment. Initiatives such as the 3rd United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the Sustainable Development Strategy for the Seas of East Asia (SDS-SEA) have bought to attention the importance of sustainable development of the coastal and marine environment. The concepts of marine spatial data infrastructure (SDI), marine cadastre and marine spatial planning have all emerged recently in response to a global realisation of the need to improve management and administration of the marine environment. The underlying theme of these initiatives is the importance of including a spatial dimension to marine administration. A more integrated and holistic approach to management of coastal and marine environments would be facilitated by the extension of the SDI on a seamless platform. This would promote data sharing and harmonisation between large numbers of diverse data holdings and an increasingly large number of initiatives in marine data thus facilitating better decision-making involving marine and coastal spatial information.

A seamless SDI platform would enable the utilisation of common boundaries across the coastal zone to ensure no ambiguity exists and no areas are unaccounted for over the coastal interface. This paper discusses the potential for adding a marine dimension to an SDI in the context of seamless model to facilitate marine and coastal zone administration and highlights the need for access to and interoperability of data from marine, coastal and terrestrial environments resulting to the better and more integrated management of coastal zone. Ideally this framework would harmonise the stewardship of and access to marine data and information, thereby facilitating improved management of marine environment.