Making waves: unique challenges for Marine Protected Areas

Protecting marine and coastal areas involves many similar issues to terrestrial protected areas, including balancing conservation and development needs and managing tradeoffs between multiple users. However, they also present unique challenges: they often cross international boundaries and the high mobility or migration of many marine species makes protection beyond boundaries difficult.

Research in the Caribbean by the University of East Anglia, UK, emphasises the following trans boundary challenges:

• Property rights are often unclear, given the overlapping institutions, rules and jurisdiction from different countries.
• Negotiating new regulatory frameworks for transboundary management is complicated and it takes time to build trust between partners concerned.
• Working across different governments and departments creates fundamental problems in terms of a failure to communicate and to share information and resources.

Even where Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are not transboundary in nature, managers must be capable of addressing huge complexities; reconciling competing user demands for both the present and future and taking management decisions on potential impacts in a context of uncertain science.

A new international research project entitled TRANSMAP (by a partnership of 12 research institutions from the United Kingdom, Portugal, Mozambique, Tanzania, South Africa and Sweden) investigates these issues in more detail in east African transboundary MPAs. It aims to propose policy options for the creation and management of protected marine areas across the Tanzania-Mozambique and Mozambique-South Africa borders which maximise ecological sustainability, stakeholder needs and management feasibility. Initial findings show:

• MPAs often incorporate several dynamic ecosystems which change over time, such as mangrove systems, tidal estuaries and deltas. An adaptive approach to management is therefore highly relevant, which responds to change rather than trying to suppress it and enhances ecological and social resilience.
• Given competing user demands, all relevant stakeholders must be involved in planning from the outset if management of MPAs is to be successful.

 

Source(s):
‘Making Waves: Integrating Coastal Conservation and Development’, pp. 164, Earthscan, by K.E. Tompkins and W.N. Adger, 2002
'People and protected areas: new agendas for conservation', September 2005, id21 insights #57

id21 Research Highlight: 5 September 2005

Further Information:
Katrina Brown
School of Development Studies and Overseas Development Group
University of East Anglia
Norwich
NR4 7TJ
UK

Tel: +44 (0)1603 593529
Fax: +44 (0)1603 451999
Contact the contributor: k.brown@uea.ac.uk

University of East Anglia, UK

Overseas Development Group, UK

Other related links:
‘People and protected areas: new agendas for conservation’

‘Is forced displacement acceptable in conservation projects?’

‘Protecting nature, culture and people’

‘Agriculture versus protected areas’

‘Tourism in Nepal’

See id21's useful web links on people and protected areas

TRANSMAP website