Marine management--towards an integrated implementation of the European Marine Strategy Framework and the Water Framework Directives.

By Á. Borja, Michael Elliott, J. Carstensen, A. Heiskanen, W. van de Bund. Marine Pollution Bulletin, 2010

501 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Through implementing environmental Directives, Europe has moved towards coordinated and integrated catchment-to-coast management, following the most novel legislation on ecosystem-based approaches worldwide. The novel joint synthesis of this direction reviewed here allows us to regard the Water Framework Directive (WFD) as a 'deconstructing structural approach' whereas the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) is a 'holistic functional approach', i.e. the WFD has split the ecosystem into several biological quality elements, then it compares the structure of these (such as species complement) individually before combining them and attempting to determine the overall condition. In contrast the MSFD concentrates on the set of 11 descriptors which together summarize the way in which the whole system functions. We emphasize that both Directives are frameworks on which many other directives are linked but that they need to be fully and seamlessly integrated to give a land to open sea system of assessment and management. Hence, by taking account of the experience gained in the WFD implementation, together with that from regional sea conventions, such as OSPAR (North East Atlantic) or HELCOM (Baltic Sea), we propose in this contribution an integrative approach for the environmental status assessment, within the MSFD.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4efffe38bd128cbe24e812aaa31886ca53522645

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In Global and Planetary Change

1. Michael Elliott
2. Joao Marques
3. Á. Borja
4. S. Bricker
5. Alberto Basset
6. R. J. West
7. Rute Pinto
8. N. Simboura

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

1. Á. Borja
2. V. D. de Jonge
3. Rute Pinto
4. Ana Cristina Cardoso
5. R. Kerry Turner
6. Laura Uusitalo
7. N. Simboura

Citations in the corpus

• Integrating ecological, economic and social aspects to generate useful management information under the EU Directives' ‘ecosystem approach’ (2012, methodology): “Despite the attempts of Borja et al. (2010) to make the implementations of WFD and MSFD as holistic as possible, we are still quite distant from it because all approaches so far are not following the requirements from ‘systems theory’ but that from the ‘EU Directives’ as implemented.”
• Good Environmental Status of marine ecosystems: what is it and how do we know when we have attained it? (2013, background): “time-dependent) processes (Borja et al., 2010).”
• Acoustic quality of critical habitats for three threatened whale populations (2014, background): “For example, the European Union’s Marine Strategy Framework Directive (2008/56/EC) outlines general standards for achieving ‘Good Environmental Status’ regarding underwater sound (Borja et al., 2010).”
• Classifying Ecological Quality and Integrity of Estuaries (2011, result): “…Directive, there is recognition that the five quality The comparison of results among the five methods applied classes of the WFD are largely un-implementable with respect to the Medway estuary also shows discrepancies in the ratings to meaningful type-specific thresholds (Borja et al., 2010).”
• Tales from a thousand and one ways to integrate marine ecosystem components when assessing the environmental status (2014, methodology): “…on the key aspects (i.e., biodiversity descriptors) Assumes that GEnS is well represented by a selection of variables Scoring or rating (Borja et al., 2004, 2010, 2011b; Birk et al., 2012) Sum of weighted scores Different weights can be assigned to the various elements Problem of…”
• Framework for understanding marine ecosystem health (2013, methodology): “The third column in Table 1 quotes from the Directive’s specifications for high quality status, which is that of the reference condition, and which it seems logical to equate with good ecosystem health.”
• DNA Sequencing as a Tool to Monitor Marine Ecological Status (2017, background): “In many cases, long-term monitoring programs evaluate the demographic status and trends of various marine populations (Borja et al., 2010 and references therein).”