Research project Law and seascapes in the Baltic Sea context

The current legal system has proven to lack the ability to achieve marine environmental targets laid down in international, EU and national law. Despite numerous of legal acts, marine biodiversity is continuing to decrease worldwide. One contributing problem is insufficient consideration to seascape interlinkages, both in space and in time, in the governance of marine ecosystems.

Consideration of seascape interlinkages is crucial for protection of marine biodiversity and sustainable harvest of fish stocks, but there is a lack of knowledge on how to design legal systems to enable this in practice. The design of environmental laws, and the legal system as a whole, can be assumed to play a decisive role in a well-functioning state under the rule of law. Hence, the overall purpose of this research project is to contribute to new knowledge on how to improve the law in order to ensure incorporation of knowledge and consideration to spatial and temporal connectivity in the governance of marine ecosystems, also in transboundary contexts. This will be achieved by a critical assessment of the current legislation in relation to both ecological understanding of seascape interlinkages and legal theory.

Based on the results, new legal approaches, or how existing approaches can be developed, to advance Swedish and EU environmental law in the protection of marine biodiversity and the sustainable use of natural resources will be proposed .  

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