Marine zoning in St. Kitts and Nevis: A design for sustainable management in the Caribbean

Similar to many coastal or island countries, the waters around St. Kitts and Nevis, an island nation in the Eastern Caribbean, are home to multiple, cumulative, and often conflicting uses of the sea. Marine spatial planning and marine zoning hold great promises for addressing and balancing a number of marine management objectives in St. Kitts and Nevis under a common framework. We outline the key activities that led to the development of a draft marine zoning design for St. Kitts and Nevis, and discuss outcomes of the planning process and possible next steps towards implementation of a marine zoning plan. The key activities were focused around: 1) engaging stakeholders; 2) establishing clear objectives; 3) building an information base that spatially represents marine uses (i.e., a multi-objective geodatabase); 4) generating tools to assist stakeholders and decision makers in generating a zoning design and considering options and tradeoffs (i.e., decision support products); and 5) outlining the location of zones via a participatory process. The vision and foundation for marine zoning we outline here can continue to be leveraged by the citizen of St. Kitts and Nevis and serve as a model in other places engaged in similar efforts.