Maritime spatial planning, or MSP, is a public process for analysing and allocating the spatial and temporal distribution of human activities in marine areas to achieve ecological, economic and social objectives. Within the European Union, Directive 2014/89/EU formally recognises cultural heritage as a relevant planning consideration, but its operationalisation across member states has been uneven and conceptually underdeveloped. As offshore wind farms, port expansions, submarine cables, aquaculture and seabed extraction intensify competition for marine space under the European Green Deal, the question of whether shipwrecks and cultural seascapes can claim a seat at the planning table has become urgent. Canoura’s analysis arrives at a decisive moment, because Spain’s next planning cycle is due in 2027.

The research uses a qualitative policy-analysis approach, systematically reviewing Real Decreto 150/2023 and the Diagnostic Reports, Block III, accompanying the five POEMs, which cover the North Atlantic, South Atlantic, the Strait of Gibraltar and Alboran Sea, the Levantine-Balearic area and the Canary Islands. The analysis is framed by the UNESCO 2001 Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, to which Spain has been a State Party since 2005, and by critical heritage scholarship and the concept of maritime cultural landscapes. Rather than assessing whether heritage inventories are complete, the study asks how heritage knowledge is translated into spatial planning instruments and how the plans reshape the conditions under which heritage is governed.

The most significant technical innovation of the Spanish framework is the creation of zones of priority use for the protection of cultural heritage, a spatial category that formally acknowledges underwater archaeological remains and culturally significant coastal-marine interfaces as planning concerns. The decree attaches a suite of protective measures to these zones: restrictions on seabed-disturbing activities such as dredging, drilling and anchoring, limitations on bottom-contact fishing gears, mandatory consultation with heritage authorities, and the integration of archaeological assessment into environmental impact assessments. These provisions operationalise existing heritage law within MSP, but the study finds they remain reactive and compliance-oriented, prioritising avoidance of physical damage rather than proactive research, strategic mapping or the integration of heritage values into broader spatial narratives.

The comparative analysis of the five demarcations exposes a striking asymmetry between analytical recognition and operational spatialisation. The Levantine-Balearic demarcation, which contains some of the richest underwater archaeological resources in Spanish waters, including Phoenician, Roman and medieval shipwrecks and submerged harbour structures, offers detailed diagnostic discussion of heritage and its conflicts with tourism, offshore energy and submarine infrastructure, yet designates no heritage priority zones at all. Conversely, the North Atlantic and South Atlantic demarcations, whose diagnostic sections are less detailed, contain the most explicit heritage-related spatial designations. In the North Atlantic, priority zones are linked to emblematic sites such as the Tower of Hercules and to culturally significant coastal-marine interfaces in Galicia and the Basque Country, making it the only demarcation to spatialise landscape concerns meaningfully.

Behind this unevenness lies a governance story. Maritime planning in Spain is coordinated nationally by the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge through the Directorate-General for the Coast and the Sea, but cultural heritage management is highly decentralised, with most responsibilities held by the Autonomous Communities, which maintain distinct archaeological inventories, permit systems and research capacities. Andalusia, through its Centro de Arqueología Subacuática and decades of investment, holds one of the most comprehensive underwater heritage datasets in Spain, and this singular institutional capacity largely drives the extensive heritage zoning in both the South Atlantic and Strait of Gibraltar demarcations. Other regions, such as Cantabria and Asturias, have yet to finalise their inventories. The study concludes that heritage integration depends more on regional institutional capacity than on a coherent national strategy.

Heritage authorities, moreover, typically participate as consultees rather than core planning actors, entering processes at late stages through consultation and environmental assessment rather than shaping spatial priorities from the start. This creates a structural imbalance in which maritime and energy sectors possess consolidated planning mandates, extensive datasets and strong institutional representation, while heritage operates through fragmented regional systems with heterogeneous resources. Data-sharing restrictions designed to protect sensitive archaeological information further limit the incorporation of heritage datasets into publicly accessible planning platforms. The result is a reactive governance model in which heritage authorities respond to proposed developments instead of influencing where development should occur.

The study also identifies a persistent conceptual narrowness. Across all five demarcations, heritage is overwhelmingly represented through tangible, mappable assets: shipwrecks, submerged structures and protected coastal monuments. Intangible maritime heritage, traditional ecological knowledge, navigation routes, fishing grounds and broader cultural-seascape perspectives remain largely absent, a bias the analysis attributes to planning systems privileging knowledge that is spatially fixed, quantifiable and administratively manageable. This contrasts with more advanced European practice: the BalticRIM project framed maritime cultural heritage as a contributor to blue growth and regional identity, Estonia combines archaeological inventories with participatory mapping and cultural-seascape methodologies, Belgium embeds seabed archaeology into offshore licensing, and Scotland’s Historic Marine Protected Areas safeguard everything from vessels to submerged prehistoric landscapes.

Why should anyone beyond planners care? Because heritage, the study argues, is not merely an obstacle to development but a strategic spatial resource. Underwater archaeological sites, historic ports and cultural seascapes drive tourism, regional branding and local economic diversification. Shipwrecks often function as artificial reefs that support marine biodiversity, and many underwater sites overlap with marine protected areas and Natura 2000 networks, offering opportunities for joint cultural-natural management. Heritage also carries strong symbolic and identity-based significance for coastal communities, making it a powerful lever for stakeholder engagement and social acceptance of marine policies, including the contentious energy transition now reshaping European seas.

The conclusions point toward concrete reforms for the 2027 planning cycle: shared geospatial infrastructures, early-stage heritage participation in plan design, cross-sectoral working groups, adaptive instruments such as areas of archaeological potential and layered heritage sensitivity mapping that can operate under data uncertainty, and conceptual tools like maritime cultural landscape corridors and cumulative impact overlays reflecting both ecological and cultural dimensions. The deeper message is that integrating heritage into MSP is not solely a technical or cartographic challenge but a governance issue shaped by institutional structures, epistemic hierarchies and competing policy agendas. Spain’s first-generation POEMs have achieved formal recognition, the study finds, but practical operationalisation remains limited. Whether underwater cultural heritage becomes a constitutive element of marine governance or remains a constraint tacked onto environmental assessments will depend on whether planners learn to see the sea not just as an economic frontier, but as a layered cultural landscape.

Subject of Research: Integration of maritime cultural heritage within Spain's maritime spatial planning framework

Article Title: The role and gaps of cultural heritage within Spain’s maritime spatial planning

Article References: Canoura, L. G. (2026). The role and gaps of cultural heritage within Spain’s maritime spatial planning. Discover Oceans, 3(1), Article 41. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44289-026-00156-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44289-026-00156-y

Keywords: maritime spatial planning, underwater cultural heritage, Spain, POEMs, marine governance, maritime archaeology, cultural seascapes, UNESCO 2001 Convention, blue economy, offshore renewable energy, heritage zoning, EU MSP Directive

The research arrives at a moment when maritime spatial planning, or MSP, has moved from an abstract academic concept to a binding legal obligation in many coastal states. The European Union’s MSP Directive, the marine spatial plans emerging across Asia, Africa and Latin America, and the target under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity to protect thirty percent of the ocean by 2030 all demand planning processes that can weigh industrial development against ecological integrity. Yet in practice, planners frequently lack a structured way to answer a deceptively simple question: which sectors depend on which ecosystem services, and what happens to human well-being when those services are degraded or displaced?

The framework addresses this gap by treating blue economy sectors not as isolated actors but as components of a coupled social-ecological system. Each sector, whether it is offshore renewable energy, commercial fishing, maritime transport, aquaculture, tourism or emerging industries such as floating infrastructure and deep-sea resource extraction, is mapped against a portfolio of ecosystem services drawn from established classification systems. These include provisioning services such as food and raw materials, regulating services such as climate regulation and coastal protection, and cultural services such as recreation, heritage and identity. By making these dependencies and impacts explicit, the framework turns what has often been an implicit, intuition-driven judgment into a transparent and auditable analytical structure.

What distinguishes the approach from earlier attempts at integration is its insistence on the socio-economic dimension. Maritime spatial planning has historically been dominated by ecological and engineering considerations, with human dimensions added late in the process or treated as constraints on otherwise technical decisions. The new framework elevates socio-economic priorities to a co-equal pillar of the analysis. Employment, food security, income distribution, cultural values, gender equity and regional development objectives are positioned as the evaluative criteria against which the consequences of sector-service interactions are judged. This means that a planning decision is no longer assessed only by its effect on a habitat or a species population, but by its cascading consequences for the livelihoods and priorities that those ecological functions underpin.

Technically, the framework operates as a structured chain of linkage analysis. In the first stage, sectors are characterized by their spatial footprint, resource demands and pressures on the marine environment, including physical disturbance, pollution, noise, greenhouse gas emissions and biological impacts. In the second stage, ecosystem services are identified and located, often using spatially explicit data layers that show where services are generated and who benefits from them. The third stage constructs the dependency and impact matrices, recording for each sector-service pair whether the sector relies on the service, degrades it, enhances it or competes with other sectors for it. The fourth stage connects these interactions to socio-economic priorities through indicators that can be monitored over time, allowing planners to track whether a given allocation of ocean space is delivering on declared policy goals.

This chain-of-linkages logic has significant practical advantages for planning authorities. It enables cumulative impact assessment to move beyond simply summing pressures and instead to trace how combined pressures alter service flows and, ultimately, human welfare. It supports scenario analysis, so that planners can compare, for example, an aggressive offshore wind build-out against a more diversified allocation that reserves space for small-scale fisheries and coastal protection habitats. It also creates a common language for stakeholders who often talk past one another. A fishing cooperative, an energy developer and a conservation agency can each locate their concerns within the same framework, which reduces the translation problems that have historically made marine planning negotiations slow and adversarial.

The framework is also designed with trade-off analysis at its core. The ocean cannot simultaneously maximize every use in every location, and the concept of the blue economy has been criticized, in some quarters, for promising growth without acknowledging the hard choices that growth implies. By forcing explicit recognition of which services are lost, degraded or gained under alternative planning scenarios, and by tying those changes to named socio-economic priorities, the framework makes trade-offs visible rather than hiding them in aggregated cost-benefit figures. This transparency matters for legitimacy. Coastal communities that see how their priorities were weighed, and where their interests were traded against others, are more likely to accept planning outcomes than communities confronted with decisions that appear to have emerged from a black box.

The study speaks directly to several urgent global policy conversations. The sustainable blue economy agenda promoted by international organizations envisions ocean industries as engines of development, but that vision is credible only if the ecological base of the economy is maintained. The framework provides a mechanism for operationalizing this conditionality: sectors can grow, but the analysis shows where growth erodes the service foundation on which other sectors and communities depend. Similarly, ecosystem-based management, long a guiding principle in marine policy, gains a concrete implementation pathway. Rather than remaining an aspiration, ecosystem-based management becomes a set of defined linkages, indicators and decision points that can be embedded in statutory planning processes.

The timing of the publication is notable. Global commitments to offshore renewable energy are accelerating, aquaculture is the fastest-growing food production sector in the world, and shipping volumes continue to rise even as nations pledge to decarbonize maritime transport. Meanwhile, the recently agreed international agreement on biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction, together with expanding networks of marine protected areas, is adding new layers of regulation to ocean space. Planning systems that were built for a quieter ocean now face simultaneous demands for industrial expansion, biodiversity protection and climate adaptation. The framework offers planners a way to integrate these demands systematically, rather than resolving conflicts case by case after they erupt.

For researchers, the framework opens a research agenda as much as it closes one. The authors’ structure invites empirical application in specific seascapes, where data on service distribution, sector pressures and socio-economic indicators can populate the linkage matrices and reveal whether the framework performs as intended under real institutional conditions. It also invites methodological development: the integration of ecosystem service models with ocean observation systems, the use of participatory mapping to capture local and Indigenous knowledge of service flows, and the coupling of the framework with optimization and simulation tools that can search for planning allocations satisfying multiple priorities at once. As more jurisdictions adopt legally binding marine plans, the demand for methods that can demonstrate the consequences of those plans for both ecosystems and people will only grow. This study provides a credible, general-purpose scaffold for meeting that demand, and its true test will be how quickly it moves from the journal page into the planning rooms where the ocean’s future is actually decided.

Subject of Research: A framework linking blue economy sectors to ecosystem services and socio-economic priorities for integrated maritime spatial planning

Article Title: Linking blue economy sectors to ecosystem services and socio-economic priorities: a framework for integrated maritime spatial planning

Article References: Pegorelli, C., Rayo-Luengo, S., Garcia-Onetti, J., de Andrés, M., Stojanovic, I., & Sanabria, J. G. (2026). Linking blue economy sectors to ecosystem services and socio-economic priorities: a framework for integrated maritime spatial planning. npj Ocean Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44183-026-00238-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44183-026-00238-6

Keywords: blue economy, maritime spatial planning, ecosystem services, ocean governance, socio-economic priorities, marine policy, offshore renewable energy, aquaculture, ecosystem-based management, npj Ocean Sustainability, Linking, blue