Vigo: Spain’s largest fishing port shares its water with cargo terminals, a shipyard, aquaculture cages and, further out, the survey vessels of companies planning offshore wind. Deciding who gets which square kilometre is the job of maritime spatial planning, and the rules governing it are about to be reopened.
The Commission has promised an Ocean Act before the end of 2026, built on a revision of the maritime spatial planning directive that has governed national sea plans since 2014. The instrument grew out of the Ocean Pact adopted in June 2025, a strategy document rather than a law, which set targets across fisheries, conservation, energy and the blue economy and left the legislative follow-up for later. A public consultation ran in the spring, following a call for evidence in January.
The drafting problem is straightforward to state and awkward to solve. Union law now sets a long list of numerical commitments touching the sea. Protected area coverage, restoration obligations, offshore renewable capacity, fishing mortality limits and pollution reduction targets all arrive from different legal instruments with different timetables and different lead departments in national administrations. A country trying to write one coherent sea plan has to reconcile them, usually with a planning authority that has no power over any of the sectors involved.
The Commission’s stated ambition is to gather those targets into a single reference and to push planning toward a sea-basin approach, so that the Baltic or the western Mediterranean gets treated as one system rather than as a set of national boxes. The legislative tracker records the commitment without a published text, which is where the file stands with roughly fifteen weeks of the year left.
Fishing organisations approach the exercise with justified suspicion. Every square kilometre allocated to wind, cables or strict protection reduces the area available to trawlers and netters, and the sector has watched that arithmetic run one way for a decade. Their argument is not that planning is wrong but that fishing gets treated as the residual user, accommodated in whatever space remains after energy and conservation have chosen. A directive revision that hardens sea-basin coordination without giving fisheries a defined seat will confirm the suspicion.
Member states will resist anything that reads like Union control over national waters. Spatial planning sits close to sovereignty, and several capitals fought hard in 2014 to keep the original directive procedural rather than substantive. A recast that imports binding targets into the planning process changes its character, and the Council will notice.
Whether the Commission tables a text in November or December decides which Parliament committee gets the file and whether trilogues can realistically start before the summer of 2027. For a port like Vigo, the practical answer will not arrive for years. The argument about who gets the water is happening now regardless.
