MPA News

Over the past decade, several large MPAs have been designated in remote offshore areas. In some of these cases – like Papahānaumokuākea (US), Chagos MPA (UK), the Coral Sea Marine Reserve (Australia), and others – the areas set aside have not been under immediate or significant threat from human use. There was relatively little extraction of resources occurring, and no adjacent human populations. The ecosystems were healthy, before and after designation. This has raised a question: Are these areas truly worthy of these dramatic protection efforts, or are they more a way to dress up relatively uncommercialized tracts of ocean…

In April, South Africa designated its first offshore MPA: a 180,000-km2 site surrounding two small sub-Antarctic islands. Located nearly 1800 km southeast of the country’s mainland, the new Prince Edward Islands MPA is intended to protect the millions of seabirds and seals that visit the islands to breed. It is also intended to contribute to the recovery of toothfish populations in the area, which were decimated by overfishing in the 1990s. The MPA’s zoning system includes a no-take Sanctuary Zone covering 17,903 km2, or roughly 10% of the MPA. (That zone, in the middle of the MPA, encompasses the two…

By Corey J. Morris and Lee-Ann V. Conrod

An oil spill inside a Canadian Marine Protected Area (MPA) and subsequent legal actions generated considerable interest recently in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.  The successful prosecution of the offending company illustrates how the particular circumstances of an MPA can inform such cases.

MPAs that exist in the same general region often share similar ecosystem features and management challenges. In that light, the idea behind building regional networks of MPA managers is to help these practitioners share their common experience and best practices, and to develop supportive relationships with one another. MedPAN (in the Mediterranean) and CaMPAM (in the Caribbean) are the longest-established and perhaps best-known regional networks of MPA managers. In contrast, one of the newest networks is MAIA. Established in 2010, MAIA is a network of MPA managers in the “Atlantic arc”, an area of the northeast Atlantic that stretches from…

The website of the Third International Marine Protected Areas Congress (IMPAC3), scheduled from 21-27 October in Marseille and Corsica, France, is up and running at www.impac3.org.  In addition to providing information on the conference, the website aims to offer content on MPA developments worldwide, as well as ocean conservation in general.  To fulfill that aim, the congress organizers invite the MPA community to submit news, photos and videos reflecting the full diversity of MPAs, related programs, research, events, and techniques around the world.  "IMPAC3 is a congress for and by the MPA community: we all stand to gain from pooling experience and knowledge," says Paul Gouin, who is handling communications and multimedia for IMPAC3.  To share content, contact him at paul.gouin@aires-marines.fr

In 2011-2012, the LMMA Network and the Secretariat of the Pacific Community co-produced a series of information sheets for fishing communities in the Pacific Islands region (www.lmmanetwork.org/resourcecenter).  The sheets describe the targeted fish species in the region, fishing methods and gear, and various community-based management measures.  Among those management measures are no-take areas.  Below, MPA News has excerpted some of the sheets' guidance on no-take area planning: