The Celtic Seas Partnership is a four year EC Life+ project supporting the implementation of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) in the Celtic Seas. It aims to draw people together from across the Celtic Seas to set up collaborative and innovative approaches to managing their marine environment. It is working to put the people that use the sea at the heart of management and offer them the opportunity to influence how their marine environment will be managed in the years to come. WWF-UK is the lead with partners the University of Liverpool, Dublin Regional Authority, the Natural Environment Research Council and SeaWeb Europe.
Since the launch event in October 2013 there have been a number of developments with the project…
Developing management measures
A key step of MSFD cycle is the development of a programme of measures. The Celtic Seas Partnership is working with stakeholders to develop measures that can feed into and support the Celtic Seas governments’ consultations on the programme of measures. A combination of stakeholder workshops online surveys, and consultation with experts has been used to develop ideas for measures and identify priority descriptors. A small number of ‘task groups’ will also be created to further refine some measures that have been identified as having the greatest impact and as something stakeholders have the power to implement. These groups will be formed of stakeholders from industry, government, environmental non-governmental organisations and academic and research institutions. For more information click here
Country workshops
The Celtic Seas Partnership has been running a series of workshops across the Celtic Seas. Workshops have taken place in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, England, France and the last one of this series is taking place next month in the Republic of Ireland (more information here).
One aim of these workshops is to get a better understanding of the current challenges that stakeholders are facing and also give people an opportunity to share their challenges with each other, looking out for any similarities. Another aim is to progress with developing management measures.
Delegates worked in multi-sector groups to produce action plans for measures. These action plans essentially set out, step by step, what would need to happen for a particular measure to be put in place and who would need to be involved.
Case study development
The project will analyse a total of nine case studies from various locations across the Celtic Seas. The aim of looking at these case studies is to draw out the lessons learnt and use these to inform three sets of good practice guidelines on…
Marine renewables co-location – to help deliver renewable energy which co-exists/minimises conflict with other marine interests and users
Conflict resolution/sectoral interaction – to help deliver ecosystem-based management that will help achieve Good Environmental Status (GES)
Transboundary marine governance – to help overcome the barriers and meet the challenges of implementing MSFD across the borders in the Celtic Seas
Through working with stakeholders at the workshops a number of possible case studies that would fit the areas were identified. These were then shortlisted to some key case studies and the Celtic Seas Partnership team are now in the process of approaching the relevant people to see if they are interested in getting involved. The chosen case studies will be announced on the website http://celticseaspartnership.eu/get-involved/ways-get-involved/case-studies/shortly.
Looking forwards the key dates are:
October 2014 – when recruiting for members of the task groups will take place
Late spring 2015 – Second multi-national workshop to take place in France
Twitter:celticseas
