Posted on October, 08 2008

During two weeks in late September 2008, WWF organized a series of workshops with three people who were key in developing and implementing the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. The objective of the workshops was to give decision-makers and other stakeholders around the Baltic Sea a chance to learn from their knowledge and experience.

It has become obvious that the escalating crisis in the Baltic marine ecosystem is in large part a failure of leadership and governance. Human interests are competing with species and habitats over the limited space of the sea. The existing patchwork of government approaches and regulatory frameworks in and around the Baltic have proved inadequate to coordinate these multiple demands. To overcome this challenge and improve the situation, WWF believes that an integrated and ecosystem-based approach to management, based on transnational spatial planning, can be a strong tool.

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park has become a well-known success story in developing and implementing such an approach. While the area is protected, all reasonable forms of use are allowed in the park within certain areas and with certain restrictions, including shipping, fishing, trawling, tourism, and off-shore development. Three key people in the development and implementation of the multiple-use marine spatial planning process were invited to the Baltic Sea region to share their different perspectives on the process. These were David Kemp (former Federal Minister for Environment and Heritage), Virginia Chadwick (former CEO/Chair of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority), and Jon Day (former Director of Conservation of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority).

Workshops were then arranged around the Baltic Sea region:
• International meeting, Stockholm, September 22, 2008
• Swedish national meeting, Stockholm, September 23, 2008, co-hosted by the Swedish Ministry of the Environment
• Finnish national meeting, Helsinki, September 25, 2008, co-hosted by the Finnish Ministry of the Environment and Metsähallitus
• Estonian national meeting, Tallinn, September 29, 2008, co-hosted by the Environment and Economic Committees of the Estonian Parliament
• German national meeting, Berlin, October 2, 2008, co-hosted by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety