Atlas of maritime Europe. The fisheries crisis

Ana Retuerta Cornejo, Eloy Ibañez Lopez-Cepero

Human Geography Department, University Of Seville (ES)

The Green Paper on Maritime Policy for EU raises the challenge of harmonizing the principle of Sustainable with the competitiveness and efficiency requirements of the most dynamical maritime sectors. This supposes the drastic reduction of activities of historical rooting, as fishing, with its important impact on fishing employment.

In the Nother regions of Europe, this impact will be mitigated by the increasing development of the most efficient fishing subsectors -processing industry of products, research in technological development...-, whereas in the southern regions of Europe basically especialized in extracting activities will experience a restructuring towards the terciarization, turning the coastal areas into zones of tourist services.

The use of GIS technologies in the project presented in this poster has been especially important in two different lines: the making of the fishing areas boundaries by mean of crossing the buffers created from the continental limits and NUTS 3 areas by geoprocessing tools, in order to create a coherent and precise topology and geometry of the new lines and polygons; and, on the other hand, the use of the potentialities that GIS provides to create high quality cartographies, that are ready to be included in an atlas.

The Green Paper on the Maritime Politicy of the European Union raises the challenge of harmonizing the principle of Sustainable with the competitiveness and efficiency requirements of the most dynamical maritime sectors. This supposes the drastic reduction of activities of historical rooting, as fishing, with its important impact on fishing employment.

In the Nother regions of Europe, this impact will be mitigated by the increasing development of the most efficient fishing subsectors -processing industry of products, research in technological development...-, whereas in the southern regions of Europe basically especialized in extracting activities will experience a restructuring towards the terciarization, turning the coastal areas into zones of tourist services.