Ocean Zone News Blog

Senator Tells Locke To “Save Your Dollars” On Spatial Planning Projects In Alaska

(SitNews) WASHINGTON, D.C. – Senator Lisa Murkowski last Thursday highlighted the importance of Alaska’s fisheries in a series of questions with Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke at a Commerce, Justice and Science Subcommittee hearing of the Appropriations Committee. “Over half of the fish harvested in the United States comes from sustainably-managed Alaskan fisheries – yet we receive a disproportionate share of the overall funding,” Murkowski said. “We have the best fisheries science and management in the country and we must not lose that.”

Arctic Climate Change a Crucial Foreign Policy Issue for Canada, Aspen Commission Offers a Way Forward, says Former Foreign Minister

From: World Fishing & Aquaculture

Transparent planning and management of European waters are needed to balance the interests at play against sustaining the long-term benefit of coastal and marine resources to society.

From: Offshore Shipping Online

The European Commission has launched an online consultation in order to collect background information on Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) and Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) for the Impact Assessment on future action on MSP and ICZM which was launched at the end of 2010.

CoastGIS 2011 will be held in Ostend, Belgium, from 5th to 8th September 2011, hosted by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO, IODE Project Office and Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) at the InnovOcean site on the quayside in Ostend.

CoastGIS 2011 is the tenth in the Conference series – a special occasion that we hope to make especially interesting and useful to the coastal and marine science, research and management communities. Many governments, including the European Commission acting at pan-European level, now formally recognise the importance of holistic Marine and Coastal Spatial Planning in order to meet the challenges presented in managing our coastlines more effectively – and preserving them for future generations in a time of climate change, associated global sea level change and economic uncertainty. In 2011, CoastGIS will focus on spatial planning, as well as many other themes – technical and non-technical, thematic and educational, focusing on ICAM methods and applications.