Maritime Spatial Planning projects (EMFAF-2023-PIA-MSP) | Deadline 27 February 2024

Deadline: 27 February 2024
Budget: € 4.000.000
Countries: Algeria, France, Italy, Malta, Mauritania, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, Tunisia
More information:   funding and tender opportunities portal by the European Commission 

 

Objective

The objective of this call for proposals is to facilitate the implementation of Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) in the EU, including through the effective application of Directive 2014/89 establishing a framework for MSP. This call is intended to fund projects developing innovative responses to tackle specific challenges that EU Members States might encounter when putting into effect, monitoring and/or revising their maritime spatial plans.

Many of these challenges are common to coastal Member States. Therefore, there is a shared interest in developing innovative responses that can apply within a sea basin and/or across sea basins. This means that projects should bring together participants from different Member States, located in a sea basin, or from different sea basins. To meet these challenges Member States will have to:

• Reflect and align their maritime spatial plans to the ambition of the European Green Deal and the related initiatives in areas such as climate change mitigation and/or adaptation, biodiversity, food, mobility, energy transition, alongside established activities and interests.
• Cater for cumulative impacts of ocean stressors: promote the use of an ecosystem-based approach, including Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs), strengthen the process of the Strategic Environmental Assessments (SEAs), which are an integral part of MSP and promote environmental monitoring to collect data and asses impacts (e.g. on offshore renewable energies).
• Reinforce the sea basin dimension of MSP: meeting the above-mentioned challenges, and integrating the new EU initiatives, will require greater cooperation in planning activities in the different sea basins.
• Making MSP digital and pan-European: The aim of this « digitalisation » is to harmonise data and to disseminate the contents of these plans through a common or shared digital platform – the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet).