The MSP4BIODIVERSITY project (2023-2026) was funded through Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) and coordinated by the National Research Council of Italy under Spoke 2 of the National Biodiversity Future Centre. It aimed at integrating biodiversity into Italian Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP). Rather than treating environmental protection as an external constraint, the project positions ecosystem health, biodiversity, and ecosystem services as core components of marine governance to reconcile maritime uses with long-term ecosystem resilience and the EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030. The project used scenario co-construction and participatory analysis, grounded in the Social-Ecological System (SES) framework, to explore marine management options, trade-offs, and uncertainties. Scenarios were developed in a real-world context, across three Italian pilot areas: The Northern Adriatic Sea (NAS), the Strait of Sicily (SoS), and the Northern Tyrrhenian and Ligurian Sea (NTS).
For each pilot area, three distinct, spatially explicit scenarios were co-constructed using a mixed qualitative and quantitative approach that blends policy analysis, scientific modelling, expert judgment, and stakeholder engagement. The “Slow Pace” scenario projects the continuation of existing environmental management trajectories; the “Nature@Work” scenario prioritises biodiversity conservation, ecosystem restoration, and expanded area-based protection; and the “Blue Development” scenario explores innovation, sustainable blue economy growth, and “building with nature” approaches. Each scenario is composed of narratives depicting the evolution at 2040 of sea uses: maritime transport and ports; energy; coastal defence; fisheries; aquaculture; coastal and maritime tourism; research and innovation; maritime safety and surveillance; and nature protection. Scenarios are also composed of maps representing the distribution of these uses and related management measures.
A strong co-development approach, involving local stakeholders in each of the pilot areas, was adopted for the scenarios’ formulation. Once developed, scenarios were used as input to a diversified suite of models to evaluate their social, economic and environmental effects. Results were then discussed with stakeholders in workshops focusing on participatory, multi-dimensional analysis of scenarios, based on a 10-tenet model.
A national workshop was organised in Rome on 31 March 2026 to discuss the transferability of the results of the MSP4BIODIVERSITY project to the Italian Maritime Spatial Plan process. The discussion focused on whether, and under which conditions, the co-construction approach developed by the project and its main outputs (scenario narratives and their spatial measures, modelling results of the analysis of the effects of these scenarios, and the integrated and participatory evaluation of the scenarios based on the integration of stakeholder evaluation and the analysis of the modelling results) effectively support the implementation, monitoring and future adaptive updating of MSP in Italy. The workshop was conceived as an implementation-oriented moment, moving beyond the technical development of scenarios and analyses to consider their practical usability for competent authorities, planners, and experts.
The scenarios were made in: 2025
The scenarios look out to: 2040
