(a) An interdisciplinary Partnership and Capacity Building Platform to support ecosystem-based management for sustainable development of oceans and coast established by 2014; (b) Cross-sectoral policy frameworks with coherent objectives and management plans to support comprehensive ecosystem-based management of oceans and coasts drafted in five countries across the Regional Seas Programme by 2017.

The project will convene an interdisciplinary global partnership to advance sustainable development with a green economy lens linking economic, social and environmental policy planning and management responses. Strategic areas will include integrated marine and coastal management, ecosystem-based spatial planning, ecosystem service valuation, and 'green economies' principles with cross-sector arrangements. The partnership will develop, test and demonstrate innovative decision-support and planning tools and build in-country capacity on integrated policy formulation, and design and implementation of cross-sectoral management responses. The project will provide training, advice, technical support and demonstrations on multi-objective policy scenarios, target-setting and management planning. Specific focus areas includes spatial trade-off analyses to guide spatial planning and zoning of human activities in the coastal zone, and a new participatory approach to MPA governance combining top-down, bottom-up and market-based approaches. Demonstrations will include MPA networks designed through multi-objective spatial planning processes identifying and reconciling objectives and performance criteria of competing sectoral uses of ecosystem services. This will be approached through an adaptive cycle of ecosystem valuation; culturally appropriate processes of community involvement, a cyclic process of evaluation of achievements against objectives and review of implementation arrangements resolving cumulative and interactive human impacts.

UNEP, Regional Seas, UN Oceans, governments, NGOs, private sectors, other international organisations.