Coastal Marine Planning

The Province of British Columbia, along with federal and local authorities, is responsible for the management of over 37,000 km of shoreline and 450,000 km2 of marine area.

In terms of jurisdiction, the province manages use of the seabed and associated resources in enclosed waters, such as all coastal areas between Vancouver Island and mainland North America and/or bays, sounds and inlets on the outer coast between the ‘jaws of the land’ (i.e., headland to headland).

ILMB has direct responsibility for the design and delivery of coastal marine planning. Coastal marine plans focus primarily on the provincial jurisdiction of the foreshore areas and address economic development and diversification, environmental threats, land and resource conflicts, First Nations issues, and support informed decision-making in coastal areas.

The province’s coastal marine planning may occur at two distinct levels:

1. Strategic level coastal and marine plans (e.g. 1:250 000 scale) designed to identify broad goals, objectives and strategies for coastal and marine resources (e.g. the Coast Land Use Decision) and,
2. Local level coastal plans (e.g. 1:50 000 to 1: 5 000 scale) that fall into three general types:

• Coastal plans designed to identify a range of land tenure opportunities to guide decision makers (e.g. North Island Straits Coastal Plan, Kyuquot Sound Coastal Plan)
• Issue resolution plans designed to resolve specific conflicts or issues associated with coastal land use uses and activities (e.g. Baynes Sound Shellfish Aquaculture Plan, Cortes Island Shellfish Aquaculture Plan)
• Special management plans that provide more detailed direction for management of specific uses or distinct areas (e.g. Nanaimo Estuary Management Plan).

• Map of Marine Plans

ILMB also participates in the development and coordination of policy related to coastal and marine issues in collaboration with the Ministry of Environment and federal agencies. This includes involvement in a review of the province’s strategic direction regarding ocean management in collaboration with federal and local governments and First Nations.

The Marine Protected Area Decision Support Tool

A product of the many coastal land use processes in British Columbia was the identification and designation of marine protected areas (MPAs). There are currently 187 provincial and federal MPAs in BC, providing enhanced protection for a multitude of species and habitats. With ever changing ocean dynamics, species distributions and associated data products it became apparent that agencies, as well as the public, needed a tool to query and report out on the state of our MPAs.

The MPA Decision Support Tool was developed to provide a variety of user groups a transparent reporting tool to facilitate analyses and visualization of the characteristics of current MPAs in Pacific Canada. This tool enables the user to produce detailed reports and tabular statistics on the social, cultural and ecological values for individual MPAs, MPA types and MPAs in a given region and/or oceanographic domain. The tool also produces statistics relative to coast-wide values and facilitates a system-wide assessment of MPAs. It also allows users to view the answers to specific combinational "queries" on particular values in the marine environment in map format, and allows users to draw their own "areas of interest" to determine what values are included within it.