On the environmental effectiveness of the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive

Abstract

Abstract:Marine and coastal ecosystems -and thus the benefits they create for humans -are subject to increasing pressures and competing usages. For this reason, the European Union (EU) adopted the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), which is to guide future maritime policy in the EU and aims at achieving or maintaining a good environmental status (GES) of the European seas by 2020. To this end, the MSFD requires the development of improvement measures, which have to be assessed inter alia by examining their cost-effectiveness and by carrying out cost-benefit analysis (CBA) before their implementation.In this paper, we investigate the applicability of environmental CBA in the marine context and identify and discuss problems that may hamper the environmental effectiveness of the MSFD. For example, marine ecosystem services are much less tangible than terrestrial ecosystem services. This implies greater challenges for the quantification of societal benefits in a marine context.One finding is that the limitations of environmental valuation methods regarding their ability to capture the whole total economic value of improvement measures are a potential source of problems, as the MSFD allows countries to disregard measures with disproportionately high costs. The transboundary nature of the main European seas adds to the complexity of the valuation task, e.g. due to the danger that benefits that occur outside of national territories are neglected. Moreover, the current state of knowledge on the functioning of complex marine ecosystems and the links to socio-economic impacts and human well-being seems insufficient to meet the MSFD requirements.

The Role of Economics in Ecosystem Based Management: The Case of the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive; First Lessons Learnt and Way Forward.

“…Finally, there are other forms of economic analysis required in the MSFD that go beyond CEA and CBA. These are summarized in Table 2 and expanded upon below (see also Bertram and Rehdanz 2013).…”

“…Along similar lines, an earlier paper by Bertram and Rehdanz (2013) examines the applicability of CBA in the marine context and outlines a number of potential limitations to the use of environmental valuation methods. The authors scrutinize the ability of such methods to capture the total economic value of improvements and achievement of GES and conclude that the current state of knowledge on the functioning of marine ecosystems and the links to socio-economic impacts and human well-being seems insufficient to underpin of the economic and social assessments required by the Directive.…”

“…An explicit definition of disproportionate costs however has not been included in the MSFD. Bertram and Rehdanz (2013) speculate that economics may provide key arguments for justifying exceptions from the GES objective.…”

“…Indeed, given that the implementation of the MSFD attempts to follow the principles of the ecosystem-based management in which marine protection and delivery of ecosystem services are realized jointly it could be further argued that a Descriptor and associated targets and measures should have been set for sustainable marine economic activity as well. However, the MSFD's goal of achieving GES by 2020 can be considered a political objective based on insights from natural sciences irrespective of social and economic consequences (Bertram and Rehdanz 2013).…”

Comparative environmental life cycle assessment of materials in wooden boat ecodesign

“…The rising awareness of climate change on a global scale as well as the impact on the sea led France (Levrel et al 2014) and Europe to set up a policy for the protection of marine areas. Up to the present, the protection of marine environments has been concentrated on a more reasonable use of marine resources (Bertram and Rehdanz 2013). Marine conservation areas are a local response to global problems (Mcleod 2013), and this poses the problem of finding effective and long-lasting solutions.…”