Balancing multiple objectives across sectors such as energy, fisheries, hazard mitigation, transportation, tourism, and conservation is among the most important challenges presently facing marine planners and managers. To address this challenge, many practitioners are grappling with ways to achieve ABM with approaches such as ecosystem-based management (EBM) and marine spatial planning (MSP).  Interactive decision support for MSP can guide managers and practitioners through ways to improve management by impartially including multiple objectives. The intention is to represent and account for these different objectives in marine ecosystem-based management and spatial planning arenas in a credible, flexible, and transparent way.  Decision support for MSP can:

• provide alternative future management scenarios
• explicitly analyze tradeoffs among objectives and highlight common ground
• be a mechanism for conducting formal and rigorous cost-benefit analyses
• ensure that the burden of proof is distributed appropriately among groups and sectors