 EU regulators are planning a stream of laws over the next few years to develop Europe's maritime sector, focusing on areas as diverse as climate change, 3-dimensional ocean mapping and coastal tourism. With some 70,000 kilometres of coastline, Europe's maritime regions are home to 40 percent of its population. Shipbuilding, shipping, ports and fisheries are key activities but offshore energy, as well as tourism, also generate huge revenues. Almost 90 percent of EU's external trade and more than 40 percent of its internal trade goes by sea. Up to now, EU policy regulating maritime-related activities has largely been conducted long sectoral lines, falling under traditional European Commission departments like environment, transport, energy and fisheries. That should now change. "Europe should pay more attention to the seas," Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said. "I am convinced a great part of our future lies in the untapped potential of the oceans." "We need an integrated maritime policy that brings everything together ... (it) will help us realise the full potential of maritime economies," he told a news conference. Starting this month and continuing until at least 2008 or 2009, the Commission would unveil a series of proposals to alter or create EU laws to boost economic growth and employment in the maritime sector, Barroso said. Although some ideas are still in the pipeline since industry and other involved parties have yet to be consulted, there are several more developed proposals. For fisheries, the Commission wants to clamp down on "pirate fishermen", who trawl illegally in EU waters, by demanding more paperwork and threatening to shut ports for landing catches. The phenomenon known as illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing (IUU) is nothing new, either in EU waters or elsewhere, but in recent years it has come back into the spotlight as depleted fish stocks demand ever stricter control measures. Laws will be tightened laws to prevent so-called destructive fishing practices like bottom-trawling -- where vessels use a cone-shaped net to scoop up fish from the sea floor -- as well as controls to stop dumping of unwanted fish. Later, after due consultation, the Commission is keen to find ways to develop and possibly raise the capacity of Europe's 1,200 ports to cope with increasing shipping and freight demand. On climate change, it will open a debate on how to cut pollution caused by shipping, and for ships at port, ways to reduce emissions by promoting more use of "shore electricity". Other action areas include possible changes to internal customs regulations to create a common European "maritime space" where shipping would face less red tape while moving through EU waters but remaining within the 27-country bloc. There are also projects to carry out 3-D mapping of all EU waters and increase maritime surveillance via long-range ship identification and tracking systems, Commission documents show.