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    • Selection scenarios
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• MMO - marine planning

Selection scenarios

The Marine Management Organisation (MMO), on behalf of the UK government, has responsibility for marine plan-making covering English territorial waters and the UK offshore marine areas.

We have assisted the MMO with the selection of its first ten planning areas, in advance of plan-making. The first plans, the East Inshore and East Offshore areas, were announced in October 2010.

The MMO sought advice from Defra about the criteria to be used to choose the first areas for plan-making. Working with the MMO's project team, we devised how best to carry out the decision-making analysis for each criterion and supplied a technical report to support the process.

The report (PDF, 1.80 MB) uses sustainable development criteria to distinguish between plan areas. Our view was that those areas to be planned first should be ones that could make the greatest contribution to the achievement of sustainable development. This was further broken down into social, economic and environmental components.

As the scope for decision-making was short, we used those data that were readily available, and based them on:

1. the intensity of human activity (as a proxy for economic activity)
2. the extent to which the environmental aspects of sustainable development are currently being delivered
3. the contribution towards achieving the social aspects of sustainable development.

An objective assessment method was adopted, which included combination of:

• geographic information system (GIS) analysis
• ranking/matrix creation
• plan-area discrimination, using principal component analysis
• scenario-testing

The figure below demonstrates the selection scenarios.

Our technical report supported the conclusion that the East Inshore and East Offshore areas, when planned together, will deliver the greatest sustainable development gain. This is due to:

• the step-change in marine activity in the offshore area
• the impacts this will have in terms of pressure on other uses and the natural environment
• the contribution that marine planning might make towards the resolution of maritime-related social deprivation.

For more about our capability in this area, please Contact us.