Research On Coastal Planning And Management

The coastal zone is an area with strong land-sea interaction as well as frequent human activities. Distribution of critical areas such as wildlife habitat, wetland and mangrove make the coastal zone important and delicate to the ecosystem management. Advantageous location and abundant natural resources attract many stakeholders performing all kinds of development including living, industry, agriculture, fishery, tourism, port and shipping, etc.People make profit for living and development from the enormous economic and ecological value of the coastal area, while they also suffer from various environmental problems due to over-development. Researching on coordinating the conflicts among relevant stakeholders, establishing framework of coastal planning and management to conduct sustainable development and protection is the hot spot in the scope of environmental management. Spatial panning is commonly recognized as a viable tool for coastal management. Geospatial technology including Geographic Information System and Remote Sensing, as well as Analytic Hierarchy Process and Multi-Criteria Decision Making method were coupled in this study to perform integrated analysis and reasonable planning and management of the study area.Through literature review of history about coastal planning and management, this study discussed some domestic and overseas cases for coastal research. This article summarized the present theories and methods for coastal planning, proposed and analyzed some existing problems. Combined with the field investigation and collected data and materials, this study tried to establish the methodology for coastal zoning and spatial planning from a perspective of land-sea use integration.Longhai is a coastal county-level city under the jurisdiction of Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, Southeast China. Located within the Western Taiwan Straits Economic Zone, coastal Longhai is an important part of Xiamen Bay. The accelerating coastal development has brought great opportunities, but also escalating environmental pressures to Longhai. This article tried to applied spatial planning and management techniques to study Longhai coastal zone as a case.The major content and conclusion of this case study is as follows:Firstly, natural and socioeconomic characteristics were digitalized and represented based on the documents and maps collected using GIS, thereby establishing the geodatabase for spatial planning and management in Longhai city.Secondly, according to division of catchment and ecological sensitive area in Longhai study area based on the geospatial techniques, coastal zone was defined and then classified into seven zones. Development suitability analysis based on MCDM was further used to verify the classification. It turned out that future suitability of each zone basically coincided with present functional orientation, which proved the scientific rationality of the division.Thirdly, this study continued to conduct the research on each zone from a perspective of land-sea integration. Land use suitability analysis based on AHP was applied to divide nearshore land into forbidden, restrictive and suitable area for construction. We established three-level grading system for shoreline protection and set up building line according to shoreline characteristic of each zone, and oriented shoreline and area development function in the future.Fourthly, based on the above-mentioned achievements, we generated coastal planning and management guide for each zone in Longhai including four aspects, shoreline protection grading, requirements and grading for important resource protection and management, shoreline and area development planning, spatial governance.