Natural Heritage Evidence to Support Strategic Planning for Marine Renewable Energy dataset https://portal.medin.org.uk/portal/start.php?tpc=007_NRW_DS114460 The Countryside Council for Wales (CCW) is committed to working with regulators and developers to support the development of marine renewable energy in locations, and using technologies, that avoid significant adverse environmental impacts. The UK government is committed to producing 15 percent of all energy requirements from renewable sources by 2020. With approximately 1.5 percent of UK energy currently sourced from renewables, significant expansion will be needed to meet this target. As far as marine sources of renewable energy are concerned, UK government has to date relied on deployment of offshore wind to contribute to UK renewable energy targets and indications suggest that commercial scale (10 to 100MW) arrays of wave and tidal technologies are expected to commence largely post 2015 (DECC, 2010). CCW have undertaken to produce and share key synthesised evidence relating to Welsh natural heritage interests, in the form of GIS-based data layers, to be taken into account by strategic planning process for marine energy devices (wave and tidal stream). The baseline layers highlight the breadth of natural heritage interests that need to be taken into account in strategic planning processes. The interpreted layers communicate the relative levels of risks to Wales' marine natural heritage from device deployment. Evidence layers have been produced for Welsh inshore territorial waters, from Mean High Water Spring baseline out to 12nm. The metadata describes the collation exercise, which was undertaken between Mar 2010 and Feb 2011. Temporal coverage of each of the baseline datasets is documented elsewhere. The environmental effects of marine renewable energy devices are not well understood and information about the marine environment is often limited, so this work is based on the best available information at the time of the study. This information is considered a snapshot in time and may be kept for archive puposes only. Newer data products may be available though the WG Marine Planning Portal. 20110630 20110630