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This chapter discusses the special problems and challenges presented by the conservation of marine habitats and species. It considers the application of protected areas policy for marine protected areas. It gives a detailed account of the legislation on Marine Conservation Zones (MCZs) and of the designation process for MCZs under the Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009. It considers the outcomes of the MCZ project in England and the consultation and designation process in Scotland. It also describes the complementary application of protected areas policy through SSSIs, European wildlife sites, and nature reserves in order to complete the suite of marine protected areas in UK waters.

We propose an additional, bold focus for the centennial of the US National Park Service: to make protection of special places in the ocean as important as it has been on land. This vision reflects the fact that 55% of the United States by area is in the ocean, but only 15% of the US ocean is strongly protected. Marine protected areas vary greatly in extractive activities permitted, ranging from fully protected marine reserves that allow no destructive activities to multiple use areas that are zoned to permit different kinds of extractive uses. Ocean protected areas have grown rapidly from 0.08% of the global ocean coverage a decade ago to 1.8% today. Little of the open ocean is protected because the legal tools for creating protected areas reside within individual countries. Using top-down authorities have led to many of our most beloved large, blue parks, but most existing coastal protected areas are small and were developed from combined efforts of diverse stakeholders. We discuss pathways to ocean protection in the United States, review the scientific lessons learned over the past century of park management, and propose a focus on “blue” to complement the first century’s focus on “green” protected areas.

The Philippines depends on its coastal coral reef fisheries as a critical source of livelihood and seafood for both export and domestic consumption. By the mid-1990s, these fisheries had been over-exploited by both large-scale commercial and small-scale subsistence fishermen. Nearly all the coastal fisheries had been over-fished, and three-fourths of the coral reefs were being eroded. This chapter profiles Apo Island, one of the oldest marine protected areas in the country; the scientific research on marine conservation and coastal resource management that led to its creation; and the challenges that the community has faced in maintaining its no-take zone. The chapter also describes the USAID-funded Coastal Resource Management Project and its work building local government capacity to manage coastal resources at a larger scale, using Malalag Bay, Mindanao, as an example.

As Chapter 6 introduced the first part of the proposal for a United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) implementing agreement, this chapter provides more information on three aspects of that agreement: (1) the institutional structure proposed and the role contemplated for the Secretariat, (2) the emphasis on regionalism and regional implementation, and (3) the form, structure, and implementation of marine protected areas (MPAs) as contemplated as one type of conservation and sustainable management measure in the proposed Agreement. This chapter explores these important components in more detail, focusing on key aspects of each issue as they relate to the proposed Agreement.

Chapter 11 focuses on protected areas. It considers how the principles developed in earlier chapters inform protected area design—especially their size, shape, and expected duration—and management. It covers the ecological principles involved (threat, distinctness, and representativeness), and their connection to the theory of island biogeography. It then discusses how these are modified by economic principles requiring that the benefits of protection need to offset the opportunities forgone by committing resources to the acquisition of the necessary rights, the additional cost of conservation effort, and the net costs to those impacted by the change in rights. It is shown how evaluation of the trade-offs involved makes it possible to identify the optimal size of individual protected areas, or the optimal structure of a network of protected areas.

There is growing awareness that ocean life is under unprecedented stress caused by the loss of habitat and biodiversity resulting from human activities. Spatial management by establishing marine protected areas (MPAs) is proposed as an important method to conserve biodiversity, manage fisheries, and increase ecosystem resilience. However, a major challenge in spatial management is that most MPAs and networks of MPAs have been created with little regard to larval dispersal and connectivity within and outside protected areas. Because of the limited understanding of larval connectivity, it is therefore often unclear whether the MPAs are ecologically functional. Larval behavior and dispersal are particularly well studied in benthic crustaceans, making them excellent model organisms to address this challenge.

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are increasingly used to manage targeted species. In order for protected areas to be effective conservation measures, strong public support is needed. Protected areas are dynamic spaces of human and interspecies interaction. Human engagement with MPAs as well as the species they are designed to protect is often fraught with deep-rooted social conflict. Conflicts often arise regarding rightful tenure, access to space, and use of resources; however, just as these interactions can provide opportunity for conflict, they also allow for the possibility of collaboration, resolution, and greater understanding. Protected areas are perceived very differently according to different ideas about the role and value of nature, historical experiences within a given environment, and cultural paradigms. Using the Westside National Park expansion project in Andros Island, Bahamas, in the Caribbean as a case study, this chapter explores the levels of conflict associated with disputes surrounding resource access and tenure systems in order to better understand the challenges of park implementation and marine conservation. Using the levels of conflict model to analyze the dispute over land tenure and access to marine resources, this chapter addresses the complexity and scope of the conflict surrounding protected areas conservation. Ignoring key issues underlying the conflict surrounding conservation projects will compromise policy goals as well as jeopardize the well-being of the people relying on the area for survival.

This chapter reviews the current literature on the ecological outcomes of various fisheries management strategies from a climate change perspective. Management of the fisheries capture process can be categorized into six main restrictive actions. These include restrictions on the area where people can fish (such as marine protected areas), the times that people are allowed to fish (seasons), the size of targeted fish (minimum or maximum), the types of species targeted, the gear used, and the amount of fishing effort. This chapter reviews the empirical research on how these various strategies: 1) impact local resource users; 2) affect the local ecology; and 3) build ecological resilience in the context of climatic disturbances.

While genuine conservation measures tend to be a last resort the increasing number of fisheries crises in the 2^nd half of the 20^th century led to numerous innovations in fisheries management and the establishment of relatively effective institutions. This chapter describes the forces that fostered increased political action by non-commercial forces, the resulting period of conflict and gradual formation of coalitions to solve major problems in specific fisheries. It covers the politics of protecting charismatic megafauna, “rationalizing” fisheries through establishment of property rights, and the development of alternatives to MSY. Legitimacy and the need for co-management are also discussed in the final section.

Ecosystem-Based Management and Marine Protected Areas. Ecosystem-based management (EBM) can be seen as a comprehensive strategy that includes the concern about the sustainable yield of fish alongside the ecosystem impacts of fishing and the impacts of fisheries management on human communities. While preventing overfishing goes a long way toward reaching its objective, protecting sensitive habitats from damaging fishing gear and reducing or eliminating bycatch of birds, mammals, and turtles must be given their due importance. Consideration should also be given to the trophic knock-on effects of fishing for one species that may cause other species less or more abundant. Marine protected areas are still considered the magic key to EBM, but their impact on total fish abundance has rarely been evaluated.

Throughout their decades in exile, Chagossian groups have focused on their campaigns for compensation and the right to return to Chagos, while other interest groups have worked against the resettlement of the Chagos Archipelago. According to the terms of the 1966 Exchange of Notes, the UK Government made Diego Garcia available for US defence purposes for an initial period of fifty years, renewable for a further twenty years. Given the military significance of the US base on Diego Garcia, it seems likely that both governments will seek to renew the lease in 2016. Meanwhile, the UK Government has allocated considerable resources towards preventing Chagossians from returning to Chagos, directly through immigration legislation relating to the British Indian Ocean Territory, and indirectly through the creation of a Marine Protected Area in Chagos.

This chapter introduces the norm of large marine protected areas (MPAs). It defines the norm and poses the two questions that this book seeks to answer: (1) Why have large MPAs emerged as the solution of choice for governments. (2) What explains differences in how governments manage their large MPAs? It positions these questions within the norm diffusion literature in international relations and offers an alternative analytical approach to norm localization in international relations that foregrounds domestic political economies. The chapter then introduces the book’s process tracing methodology and details case selection and data collection.

Sharks and rays are among the most threatened aquatic vertebrate taxa. This is due to a combination of their slow generation times, exploitation within the fisheries, and habitat degradation. Climate change was added as an additional, major threat to sharks and rays in the first decade of the 21st century. While marine protected areas are becoming more widespread, managing and conserving sharks and rays is complicated. Yet, the conservation physiology toolbox can be used to address such challenges. Here, we highlight studies from the Physioshark project, a conservation physiology research programme initiated to understand how human-induced stressors, primarily climate change, will affect tropical sharks and rays and the consequences for the health and viability of populations. We also highlight how other research teams from around the world have taken physiological approaches to understanding conservation problems for sharks. We then emphasize the importance of public outreach and education about the conservation issues sharks encounter, the benefits of using social media to disseminate key concepts, publications, presentations, media, and successes, and we underscore the power of storytelling through digital media as an important means for attracting attention to research, which can result in support and action.

This chapter turns to the management of capture fishery resources at the national/regional level. The starting point is the perverse incentives confronting fishermen in open access (common pool) conditions — pure or regulated — and the essential need for fisheries management to confront these destructive incentives. Two broad approaches to fisheries management are considered: incentive blocking and incentive adjusting. The discussion of incentive blocking approaches to management does, inter alia, raise the question of the efficacy of vessel decommissioning schemes. The discussion of incentive adjusting approaches to fisheries management gives particular attention to taxes and to harvesting rights schemes. The chapter then examines the ancillary role of marine protected areas, and goes on to discuss the consequences of massive government subsidies for effective fisheries management. The chapter concludes by considering means of mitigating the effects of irreducible uncertainty in fisheries management.

This chapter calls into question the veracity of stories, often seen in the scientific literature and popular media, describing the collapse of fish stocks and predicting a soon-to-be-seen dramatic decline in food production from the ocean. In fact, detailed scientific analyses suggest that fish stock abundance is globally stable, and much of the decline in fish catch has been due to more stringent management of fisheries in many countries. This has led to a polarization between those who look at abundance trends, and argue that improving fisheries management is the solution, and those who look at catch and argue that fisheries management does not work and marine protected areas are needed. Data clearly support the effectiveness of fisheries management, whereas remarkably little data demonstrates the impact of marine protected areas outside of the closed areas. This chapter argues the actual impacts of MPAs need to be evaluated much more intensively.

This chapter discusses marine protected areas (MPAs). Various types of MPAs have been established worldwide for a wide variety of reasons, including prevention of overfishing, protection of species and habitats, preservation of special areas, as insurance policies for large-scale impacts, as nurseries for exploited species, and to restore trophic linkages and ecosystem functioning. The formation of MPAs has been a long-fought battle by scientists and environmentalists who now have considerable credence with a wide range of stakeholders, who have increasingly recognized the stresses on coastal ecosystems and the need for some form of protection. In many ways, MPAs are simple management tools, affording partial or full protection from exploitation of species and habitats within their borders.

The depletion of fish stocks on a global scale is well documented. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation collects statistics on fisheries from all states and, despite obvious shortcomings in the data, a clear picture has been available for some time. Garcia and Grainger (2005) have succinctly documented the position from the latest available date: in 2003, only 3% of stocks were underexploited and 26% moderately exploited, while 52% were fully exploited, 16% were overfished, 7% were depleted, and 1% were recovering from earlier depletion. These global statistics mask two important phenomena. The first, highlighted by Pauly et al. (1998), is that fisheries are increasingly focusing on species lower down in the food-web and the second, highlighted by Myers and Worm (2003, 2005), is that large predatory fish have been particularly reduced in abundance. Both of these analyses are somewhat flawed. In the case of Pauly et al. there are two problems: the first is that the metrics used for the mean trophic level are presented as simple numbers with no estimates of error or indeed sensitivity. In such a situation, the changes in mean trophic levels are hard to interpret, particularly where the mean trophic level changes by at most around 10% over four decades. The second problem has been highlighted by a recent paper by Essington et al. (2006). They point out that in the periods when according to the analysis of Pauly et al. the mean trophic level was declining, in most cases catches of apex predators and indeed all upper trophic levels increased (an exception is the North Atlantic). In the case of the Myers and Worm analysis, they used the catch per unit of effort (CPUE) as an index of abundance. As discussed later in this chapter, there are problems with this, but more importantly for some key apex predators, in particular large tunas, the CPUE declines in the early stages of the fishery, where catches are small, but remains relatively stable under a regime of much higher catches. In such a situation, the interpretation that the CPUE reflects changes in abundance is clearly problematic.

A plot of the number of parks and other terrestrial protected areas established around the world over the past 100 years exhibits near-exponential growth, with marine parks following a similar trend. This is a testament to the growing recognition of the importance of sustaining natural systems worldwide. Yet, at the same time an expanding human population and the desire of all people for a more prosperous life have resulted in unprecedented rates of deforestation and habitat conversion. Accompanying these changes has been the spread of invasive, non-native species (including new disease organisms) to virtually all parts of the globe. With recent assessments placing 12% of the world’s birds, 23% of mammals, and 32% of amphibians in danger of extinction (Baillie et al., 2004), conservationists feel a justifiable sense of panic. Any attempt to measure the full extent of the current biodiversity crisis is made immensely more difficult by our astounding lack of knowledge about the species that share this planet with us. For example, we do not know within an order of magnitude the number of species currently present on Earth (May, 1988, 1992; Novotny et al., 2002); estimates range from 3 to more than 30 million species, of which only 1.5–1.8 million have been described to date. Not surprisingly, our inventory of the more charismatic groups of organisms, such as birds, mammals, and butterflies, is vastly more complete than our inventory of insects, arachnids, fungi, and other less conspicuous but no less important groups. If we ask the logical follow-up question—what proportion of known (described) species is in danger of extinction?—we run into a similar barrier. While organizations like the World Conservation Union (IUCN) have prepared reasonably complete assessments for a few groups, notably the charismatic vertebrates, most species are too poorly known to assess. Even within the USA only about 15% of the species catalogued to date are sufficiently known to be given any sort of conservation rank, such as endangered or not endangered (Wilcove and Master, 2005); among invertebrates that value drops to less than 5%. Compounding this shortfall of data is an equally serious shortfall of money.