Decision-Support for the Economic Analysis of Trade-offs in Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning (CMSP) for the US Northeast Region
Collaborators:
T. Dalton (URI); M. Davis (Tufts); G. Herrera (Bowdoin); D. Jin (WHOI); H.L. Kite-Powell (WHOI); B. Wikgren (New England Aquarium)
The primary goal of our research is to further develop and refine a decision-support methodology for the evaluation of socio-economic tradeoffs in CMSP. CMSP is a process for improving the management of coastal and marine resources in order to promote their sustainable development. Sustainability necessitates that decisions be made about the existing and future spatial and temporal distributions of human uses (and non-uses) of the coastal and marine environment. Such decisions require methods for making tradeoffs. Existing state-level planning efforts, particularly in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, have been designing approaches for making CMSP tradeoffs, but these methods are still emergent. Our primary objective is to develop an economic methodology based upon models of spatially distributed regional economic impacts to characterize the tradeoffs among alternative CMSP policies. A secondary objective is to demonstrate the practical utility of the methodology using ecological and socio-economic data relating to the coastal ocean of the US Northeast Region. |
