Wednesday, May 25, 2011

National Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning Workshop

Last year, I wrote about the Final Recommendations of the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force that President Obama adopted by Executive Order on July 19, 2010.

The Final Recommendations included the creation of a Policy Coordination Framework and Implementation Strategy.  Under the Framework, the United States is subdivided into nine regional planning areas.  Hawaii is part of the Pacific Islands Region, which includes Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana
Islands, and American Samoa.  The Implementation Strategy identifies priority objectives that our Nation will pursue to address pressing challenges facing the ocean, our coasts, and the Great Lakes.  One of those nine strategies is Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning (CMSP) to implement comprehensive, integrated, ecosystem based coastal and marine spatial planning and management in the United States.  Each regional planning area is tasked with developing a CMSP for its region.

The National Ocean Council (NOC) will hold a National CMSP Workshop in Washington, DC, on June 21-23.  The first day of the Workshop will be a dedicated public and stakeholder session.  This public session will take place on Tuesday, June 21, 2011, from 9:00 am to 5:30 pm, in the Yates Auditorium at the U.S. Department of the Interior, located at 1849 C Street, NW Washington, DC.  For those who cannot attend the session in person or if interest exceeds capacity, it will also be available to the public through a live webcast on June 21, 2011 at www.doi.gov/live.

For more about this initiative, visit the NOC website at www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/oceans.

No comments: