Improving the level of land‒sea coordination: An integrated framework for identifying and assessing conflicts in coastal areas

Abstract

Urbanized coastal areas face both resource-use and spatial conflicts as a result of rapid development. To improve the level of land‒sea coordination (LSC), a new integrated framework is proposed in this paper for identifying and assessing conflicts, which are termed "point-line-surface" conflicts, on the basis of morphological characteristics. Point conflicts are focused on conflicts in reality, while the other conflict types involve potential conflicts in spatial planning. Drawing upon diverse sources of statistical data concerning land and marine use survey results and spatial plans, we use a general conflict matrix, a geographic grid approach and spatial data analysis to quantitatively measure the intensity and spatial distribution of coastal conflicts. A case study in Laizhou, a county-level coastal city in China, is used to demonstrate this framework. The results show that point conflicts mainly exist between water and wetlands (UWW) and fishery (UF) and between industrial and mining (UIM) and UF. Line conflicts show that the conflict between marine spatial planning (MSP) and urban spatial planning (USP) is greater than that between land spatial planning (LSP) and USP, and surface conflicts indicate that functional zones with high externalities are mainly concentrated near central towns and industrial clusters. The optimization of existing land and ocean use patterns and the coordination of different spatial plans might serve as effective approaches for improving LSC in coastal areas.