Multiple Objective Planning

Perhaps the most important challenge in marine planning is to transparently and explicitly consider multiple management objectives across such sectors as biodiversity conservation, energy production, fishery production, and transportation. Consideration of explicit trade-offs among multiple objectives and examination of alternative scenarios for meeting the objectives are the newest and most rapidly developing areas of marine planning. Closely tied to these challenges is the need for every plan to have aims that are clear and stakeholders who are engaged.

Dual or Multiple Objectives?

When attempting to make management decisions that integrate across sectors, it may be tempting and initially easier to develop a plan that addresses only a pair of management objectives, such as

• energy production and biodiversity conservation, or
• fishery production and sand extraction.

Data collection and the analysis of tradeoffs, for example, may be greatly simplified if only one or two objectives are included. However, the long-term outcomes of dual objective planning are likely to differ from those of multiple objective planning. The complexity of the planning process increases considerably by taking a multi-objective approach, but the resulting plan has the potential to provide greater net benefits at a lower overall cost.

Keeping a Focus on Key Issues

A multitude of human activities may occur in the planning region. Planners and stakeholders can easily become overwhelmed by the many and varied human uses, associated datasets, and numerous tradeoffs among human uses. However, the focus of the process should be on helping decision-makers to meet their overarching management objectives, which are usually few in number and are defined fairly well in legislation and policy. Typically, management objectives address fishery production, energy production, environmental conservation, and coastal access, among others. Maintaining a focus on the overarching management objectives can keep the planning process from becoming overwhelmingly complex.

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