LSustainable Development Goal 14 of the United Nations calls for “conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources”. It sums up the attention paid today to a sustainable maritime economy. Knowledge accumulated in recent decades has highlighted the effects of human action on marine ecosystems. According to experts from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), 66% of the marine environment has been modified by humans under the combined effect of various factors such as pollution, the overexploitation of marine species, or developments at sea and on the coast (coastal urbanization, offshore wind turbines, etc.).
Considered for a long time as a space of freedom and as the only domains of fishing or maritime transport, the sea has seen the number of human activities multiply – extraction of marine sands, renewable marine energies, yachting – and intensify for some , like tourism. In response, political messages follow one another to reconcile “economic and social development” and “preservation of the marine environment”, as evidenced by the recent communication (2021) from the Brussels Commission aimed at transforming the maritime economy of the European Union into a sustainable “blue economy”.
This recent political eagerness around the blue economy should not make us forget that several public policies, European and French, have sought to achieve sustainable development at sea, and this for several decades. The balance is tricky to find, because it requires a global vision of the interactions between society, human activities and the marine environment.
The future of maritime facades
Currently, the most common way to achieve this is to bring together actors from the economic, academic, institutional and civil society worlds to meet, discuss and negotiate. This approach, described as “integrated” because it covers all the issues and players, is complex to implement. The French example that best illustrates this complexity is the implementation of the “national strategy for the sea and coastline”.
This ambitious strategy, established in 2017, takes up European guidelines: to develop human activities at sea and on the coast to a level allowing good quality of marine and coastal waters. Its concrete translation takes the form of a tool, called a “strategic seafront document”, the objective of which is to define the desired future on each of the four metropolitan seaboards (Atlantic, Channel, North Sea, Mediterranean). It was developed during a six-year process, piloted by the State, in which the actors of the facade are associated (elected officials, companies, associations). The first strategic facade documents have just been finalized in 2022.
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