Bringing order to the wild west off the Bay State's coast

Massachusetts has been talking about the need for a state ocean management plan for more than fifteen years. This year, everything fell into place.

Earlier in the year, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation awarded a three-year $8.2 million grant to the McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies at UMass Boston, to focus on developing information and tools that improve the integration of natural and social science with ocean management.

In May 2008, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick signed the nation's first comprehensive ocean planning law to reduce tensions among maritime users and guide energy development. A handful of companies have announced plans to build wind farms, liquefied natural gas terminals, and projects designed to capture energy from the tides.

Many user groups think the current state of affairs off the coast is akin to the wild west. The bill as an opportunity to manage ocean sprawl based on sound science, smart economics, and sensible management principles.

The state's Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs Ian A. Bowles must develop the plan by the end of 2009 with input from the public and 17-member advisory commission.

Stephen P. Crosby, dean of UMass Boston's McCormack Graduate School, hopes the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation grant will help. The grant focuses on science integration efforts that will directly support the state’s formal ocean management planning and decision making processes. Senior research fellow, Robbin Peach, assists Crosby on the project.

Peach and her colleagues on the Massachusetts Ocean Management Task Force initiated the concept of securing a grant. The Task Force, comprised of state and local officials and private individuals representing diverse ocean user groups, met between June 2003 and March 2004 to develop recommendations for state action. To maintain momentum, Peach organized a group called Massachusetts Ocean Partnership (MOP), now housed at UMass Boston. MOP is a collaborative partner with planning efforts underway.

With the Moore Foundation grant, MOP will tackle questions such as what tools exist and what tools need to be developed to evaluate economic tradeoffs when considering resource management options. MOP also will convene working groups in a non-regulatory setting to seek collaborative solutions to difficult ocean management issues and options for consideration in formal decision-making processes.

Achieving the management coordination, integration of scientific information, and stakeholder involvement will require new levels of collaboration among public and private entities involved in ocean activities.

“The University of Massachusetts Boston was a logical home for this (grant) initiative,” says Crosby, “with coastal and ocean scientists and policy specialists already conducting research on the environmental health and economic importance of coastal waters.”

UMass Boston played a leading role on the scientific committees decades earlier. The Boston Harbor cleanup project was hampered by the scarcity and poor quality of available information in such key areas as water quality and pollution sources.

The health of ocean waters and fisheries suffers from the gaps created by differing laws and mixed jurisdictions, and failure to manage the coastal-ocean ecosystem as a whole. Upon final adoption, the ocean plan will be incorporated into the existing coastal zone management plan and enforced through the state’s regulatory and permitting processes.

Concern over competing ocean uses is growing nationwide, and some states, including California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Florida, and North Carolina, have created ocean authorities or announced plans to better manage state waters. But Massachusetts has now become a leader in ocean policy in this country.