The sea is an important resource that has to be valuated and preserved, trying to protect the ocean is one of the global challenges that the world is facing right now. In the last decades, plans have been developed for the marine areas to manage the different activities and users of the sea. One of these strategies is the Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) that has been used worldwide. However, in some cases the MSP do not minimize and solve the conflicts that exist between different marine sector, such as the wind farm offshore companies and the fisheries communities.
The focus of this paper is to investigate how the sectors of wind farms and fisheries management were included in the planning process of a case-study in Portugal with the WindFloat Atlantic project and the role of stakeholders (i.e. coastal communities) in this procedure. In October of 2019 it was implemented in the north of Portugal, near to the coastal city of Viana do Castelo the first turbine of three from the WindFloat Atlantic project, being the world second floating wind park.
Nonetheless, even as this project was implemented there were some conflicts between the fisheries community and the wind energy sector, as there was no decision-making consultation of different stakeholders, especially the fisheries sector. The solution for solving the conflict was the financial compensation given to the fisheries sector. In this paper, solutions implemented in other countries will be analyzed to understand how they could be beneficial in the future for similar cases in Portugal, in order to avoid the shortcomings of this case.
This case-study will be further studied and analyzed, based on the institutional change theory, using literature review and semi-structured interviews as part of the methodology.
This topic is important to analyze and further study in order to periodically revise the marine spatial plan, as this should be a continuous and interactive process, incorporating new information and helping solve conflicts between the users of the sea.