SIMWESTMED initial assessment : MSP oriented (R1)

Abstract

This Report has been created thanks to the collaboration of all the Member States involved in the SIMWESTMED project (Figure 1) that have been invited to complete the Country Fiche(CF), a document that has leaded to the development of shared knowledge regarding the marine area considered in the project. Thus, the aim of this Report is to entail a collection of information across the European countries of the Western Mediterranean region and the Strait of Sicily, including Malta waters. The Initial Assessment (IA), in fact, provides an initial overview of the area’s characteristics and this report is the harmonized output of all available information including the description of marine environment, maritime activities, key sectoral and socio-economic trends and emerging pressures, legal and transboundary issues, and governance aspects. The assessment uses existing information by organizing them in a comparable way in order to carry out a previous analysis on the main driver and issues that need to be considered for future MSP processes. The IA is based mainly on desk-based reviews, in order to build a shared synthetic view on the Western Mediterranean region, identifying key issues (main activities and priority conservation issues) and data gaps that are synthesized in the following report.