Review on the Conflicts between Offshore Wind Power and Fishery Rights: Marine Spatial Planning in Taiwan

Abstract

In recent years, Taiwan has firmly committed itself to pursue the green energy transition and a nuclear-free homeland by 2025, with an increase in renewable energy from 5% in 2016 to 20% in 2025. Offshore wind power (OWP) has become a sustainable and scalable renewable energy source in Taiwan. Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) is a fundamental tool to organize the use of the ocean space by different and often conflicting multi-users within ecologically sustainable boundaries in the marine environment. MSP is capable of definitively driving the use of offshore renewable energy. Lessons from Germany and the UK revealed that MSP was crucial to the development of OWP. This paper aims to evaluate how MSP is able to accommodate the exploitation of OWP in Taiwan and contribute to the achievement of marine policy by proposing a set of recommendations. It concludes that MSP is emerging as a solution to be considered by government institutions to optimize the multiple use of the ocean space, reduce conflicts and make use of the environmental and economic synergies generated by the joint deployment of OWP facilities and fishing or aquaculture activities for the conservation and protection of marine environments.