Sea Use Planning: A Case Study of the Yellow Sea

Abstract

This dissertation addresses the important utility of sea use planning in dealing with transboundary marine issues such as marine living and non-living resource management, marine environmental protection, and maritime transportation safety in semi-enclosed or enclosed seas. The study uses the Yellow Sea as a special region for a detailed case study. Theoretically, the study focuses on structuring a framework for sea use planning. Practically, it focuses on defining special marine policy and ocean zones for the Yellow Sea to protect seriously-exhausted marine fishery resources and the decreasing marine environmental quality, explore and exploit offshore petroleum resources, and guarantee the safety of maritime transportation. To avoid and reduce possible sea use conflicts is of concern and approaches to a regional cooperation are sought. A geographical approach toward ocean management is used in this study: a geographic grid system has been devised and applied to the study for better managing the marine issues in the Yellow Sea.