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Under current greenhouse gas emissions rates, climate change will alter ocean ecosystems dramatically in the coming decades. According to a study earlier this year on MPAs and climate change, even no-take protections may not offer much long-term cover from dramatic disruption, including significant shifts in species and habitats.
By Rachel Jones
On 11 September 2018 the Bertarelli Foundation hosted its first Marine Science Symposium at the Royal Geographical Society in London. The event was a showcase for the first full year of activities in the Bertarelli Programme in Marine Science – a program that focuses entirely on the 644,000-km2 British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) marine protected area, which includes the Chagos Archipelago.
By Anne Nelson and the IMPACT team
Our IMPACT training team has spent a lot of time lately on building capacity for good governance. Good governance may be viewed as applying a set of internationally accepted principles for governing protected areas. These include equity, inclusivity, accountability, efficiency, responsiveness, transparency, and more.1 MPAs that effectively apply these good governance principles can have sustained support and resiliency, and can meet multiple community and conservation goals.
These recent articles or preprints on MPA-related science and policy are all free to access.
Preprint: Voyer, M., et al. Shades of blue: what do competing interpretations of the Blue Economy mean for oceans governance? Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning 20, 595 - 616 (2018).
Eight nations met in Greenland in October to sign a historic formal agreement, first announced in November 2017, that bans commercial fishing across much of the Arctic for the next 16 years.
Most of the world’s MPAs are partially protected: they restrict some extractive activities but allow others. For planners and decision-makers – especially in regions where extractive resource use is high – partially protected MPAs can be easier to designate than no-take areas. The partial protection indicates to resource users that socioeconomic and conservation objectives have been balanced.
In 2016, the EBM Tools Network compiled a list of hands-on, online activities for teaching about ecosystem services and ecosystem-based management that has since been updated with several more activities. Recently, a university professor asked the Network if any similar online resources existed for teaching MPA design and management. EBM Tools Network members pooled their collective knowledge again and came up with a list of resources for teaching about MPAs at all educational levels.
To that list, MPA News has added a compilation of in-person training opportunities that are aimed at MPA professionals. The combined list of resources and trainings is below.
By Anne Nelson and the IMPACT team
How many times have you had a discussion on the potential impact of future human activities in your MPA and the conclusion is, “We don’t have enough information on that species, habitat, use, or impact”? Often the reasons for the data gaps are that there is no funding for data collection without a related project, or not enough capacity, or it’s not in someone’s plan of work to focus on the activity and there’s no direction from leadership to do the work.
By Sibylle Riedmiller and Eleanor Carter
When Chumbe Island MPA was first conceived in the early 1990s we could never have foreseen the kind of struggles we were going to encounter. Having such an original approach, with Chumbe being the first privately managed MPA in the world, we understood that it wasn’t going to be easy. Building an ecolodge on a remote island, undertaking outreach, engaging and training community members to be conservation stewards, building capacity of former fishers to become environmental education specialists, introducing high-end hospitality skills into communities with little experience in this area — these were all challenges we expected and planned for.
These recent articles on MPA-related science and policy are all free to access.
Article: McDermott, G. R. et al. “The blue paradox: Preemptive overfishing in marine reserves.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 1802862115 (2018)