Taking Biodiversity into Account in Territorial Planning Documents: A Methodological Approach Applied to the Marine Field

Abstract

The awareness of biodiversity erosion was truly concretized in 2002 during the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg with the signature, by 150 states, of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Its ambitious objective is to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss from 2010. In addition, strategies for biodiversity by European Community and at national and regional levels are based on the CBD. Faced with the importance of the biodiversity stakes, it became essential to integrate this aspect within all territorial planning documents. However, if all agree on the need to preserve biological diversity, many investigations of the methodological approaches are still needed. In this context, we aimed to extract rigorous methods from the scientific world and adapt them to obtain an operational tool that can be usefulness for local managers. This work was carried out to support the implementation of the Biodiversity Regional Strategy (SRB), which was initiated by the Languedoc-Roussillon region (France). Our work reported here started from a synthesis and an analysis of all methods used to take into account the biological richness in the current steps of territorial planning, both in the terrestrial and marine fields. Then, specific attention was devoted to the marine domain with three regional planning documents: the maritime topic of SCOT (Scheme of Territorial Coherency), the marine ZNIEFF (Zone with Flora and Fauna Interest), and Natura 2000 in the sea. Based on theses analyses, we first established methodological suggestions for a biodiversity assessment framework.