Puducherry has launched the India’s first Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) framework. The MSP has been launched as part of a pact under the Indo-Norway Integrated Ocean Initiative, to balance growth alongside sustainable management of ocean resources and coastal environment preservation.
What is a Marine Spatial Planning (MSP)?
- According to UNESCO, Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) is a public process of analyzing and allocating the spatial and temporal distribution of human activities in marine areas to achieve ecological, economic and social objectives that have been specified through a political process.
- MSP is not an end in itself but a practical way to create and establish a more rational use of marine space and the interactions among its uses, to balance demands for development with the need to protect the environment, and to deliver social and economic outcomes in an open and planned way.
Puducherry MSP: Key points
- Puducherry and Lakshadweep were chosen as coastlines to pilot the MSP initiative that grew out of a 2019 memorandum of understanding that envisaged India and Norway collaborating on implementing MSP in the oceanic space.
- MSP would serve as a vital governance tool in ensuring the emergence of a blue economy characterised by a sustainable and equitable ocean resource management, instead of an environmentally unsustainable brown economy.
- The MSP is an enabler of the blue economy as it helped identify sites for new and emerging uses following an ecosystem-based approach, and it also mitigates inter-sectoral conflicts, and creates multi-use spaces for coexistence and synergies.
