Around 15 million people live within ten kilometres from the Baltic Sea coastline, and many more enjoy the benefits it provides to our lives – jobs, leisure, and the blue economy. Given the needs of modern societies surrounding the limited sea area, the Baltic Sea is a puzzle of ports and harbours, fishing, shipping and transportation lanes, islands, leisure boating, submarine pipelines, marine protected areas (MPAs), an increasing number of wind farms and much more. The question remains: how do all these fit together without harming one another?

The Challenge: From National to Transnational

Maritime spatial planning (MSP) has been a key asset for the Baltic Sea countries in making effective use of the limited yet busy sea area from surface to seafloor. The surrounding countries are solving this puzzle nationally, whereas human activities at sea and marine ecosystem resilience are both inherently transnational. Therefore, supporting environmental resilience and the blue economy, whilst ensuring the Baltic Sea’s recovery back to good health, requires regional policy, guidelines, and practical tools to be incorporated in maritime spatial planning.

The SEABAS project platform aims to tackle this challenge by creating a regional framework that incorporates environmental resilience into maritime spatial planning. The framework offers guidelines, tools, and recommendations for integrating Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) into maritime spatial planning throughout the Baltic Sea region.

The Regional Future of Maritime Spatial Planning

SEABAS envisions a future where regional maritime spatial planning processes ensure environmental resilience and a collaborative cross-border approach whilst supporting a sustainable blue economy. Each piece – whether fishing, offshore energy production, or marine protected areas – fits in the transboundary Baltic Sea puzzle, providing prosperity and well-being for the region and all its inhabitants from seals and seagrass meadows to blue-mussels and humans.

SEABAS Solutions Helping to Solve the Transnational Puzzle

To succeed, the SEABAS project platform builds on more than eight EU projects, all providing input for a regional framework in the form of tools, guidelines, or other deliverables. For example, the SEABAS end solutions improve maritime spatial planning by gathering a selection of scattered environmental information tools into a toolkit to support maritime spatial planners across the region and by addressing the lack of regional methodology to bring in the environmental aspects in cross-border consultation processes. SEABAS will pilot the end solutions to ensure they meet the needs of the Baltic Sea region, as well as a wide range of professionals and organizations working in the field.

For the benefit of the Baltic Sea Region

By creating a regional framework, the project supports aligning transboundary maritime spatial planning with EU policies such as The European Green Deal and Nature Restoration Law, helping to secure sustainable practices regionally. Ultimately, the SEABAS project platform will enable environmentally resilient and collaborative maritime spatial planning processes across the Baltic Sea region, whilst supporting a sustainable blue economy.