Study On Marine Major Function Oriented Zone Planning On Bay Based An Ecosystem Management

Global oceanic economic activity plays an important role in the current and future economic development,but appears to be accelerating pressures on coastal and marine environment,and therefore the need for balancing exploitation and protection of marine areas and resources has become critical.Marine spatial planning(MSP)has been widely considered an effective instrument to address sea use conflicts and development-conservation conflicts by the international community.At the same time,Ecosystem-Based Management(EBM)was been recognized increasingly by the academic community.In China,marine principal functional zoning(MPFZ)was proposed in 2006 as a new spatial strategy for regulating and optimizing the spatial pattern of regional development,unfortunately very few studies have been conducted to analyze the successful experiences of implementing MPFZ.Through exploring the problems and limitations of existing MPFZ from both technical and administrative perspective,this paper summarizes the deficiencies of MPFZ,including:(1)adopt administrative boundary rather than ecosystem boundary;(2)its minimum zoning unit is county level,which cannot form effective function and regulation to the coast area;(3)the relationship between land planning and sea zoning are separating,which failed to connect the land environment integrated management and Integrated coastal zone management;(4)the evaluation system pay less attention to the coordination between land and sea.Then a new couple framework of the marine principal functional zoning with ecosystem-based management(MPFZ-EBM)was proposed in this study to improve China's marine spatial planning,along with the evaluation index systems which considers three aspects(i.e.marine resources and environment carrying capacity,marine development and utilization,and marine development potential),seven dimensions(i.e.resource,environment,ecology,risk,economic,social,location),and 21 indicators.The proposed methods and evaluation index system were applied to the assessment for the marine functional zones of Meizhou Bay and adjacent catchment area.The evaluation results determined a reasonable marine spatial development zone of the Meizhou Bay that can be further adjusted and refined to form the national and provincial marine principal functional zones.The proposed methods and system are practical and effective to regulate the allocation of sea area and to ensure the ecosystem health thereby achieving the sustainable development of the coastal area.