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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Mar. Sci.

Sec. Marine Conservation and Sustainability

Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2025.1658939

Comprehensive Protection and Revitalization of Levuka World Heritage from the Perspective of Marine Spatial Planning

Provisionally accepted
Wanchao  KangWanchao Kang1XIN  TENGXIN TENG1*Qiwei  ZhaoQiwei Zhao1Arpana  PratapArpana Pratap2Xue  MengXue Meng1Panpan  ZhangPanpan Zhang1
  • 1National Marine Technology Center, Tianjin, China
  • 2Pacific Islands Development Forum, Suva, Fiji

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

The protection and development of World Heritage Sites are of great significance for inheriting human civilization, and it is crucial to maintain and enhance their brand quality. Located in a coastal area, the Levuka Historical Port Town currently faces issues such as damage of world heritage and lagging overall development. From the perspective of marine spatial planning, this paper analyzes the conflicts and synergies between land and sea uses, formulates corresponding compatibility rules, and takes blocks as basic units to measure the compatibility and functional optimization strategies between various activities, exploring effective means of achieving comprehensive protection and revitalization of world heritage. The results show that the Levuka Historical Port Town has a good overall compatibility between land and sea uses, but its land use mixing degree is low, with great potential for revitalization. Using marine spatial planning, the Levuka Historical Port Town is divided into a protection zone, an optimization zone, a function expansion zone and a function integration zone. it is necessary to reasonably control activities that threaten relics, promote activities conducive to the development of relics, moderately introduce other functions, increase the vitality of World Heritage Sites, and promote sustainable development of world heritage.

Keywords: marine spatial planning, World heritage, Revitalization, protection, Function optimization

Received: 03 Jul 2025; Accepted: 30 Sep 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Kang, TENG, Zhao, Pratap, Meng and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: XIN TENG, notctengxin@163.com

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