MPA News

It is increasingly recognized that “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches are critical to governing MPAs. That is, MPAs should combine the benefits of state control and binding legislation (top-down) with the benefits of community-based approaches that empower local people and involve them in decision-making (bottom-up). By pairing the approaches, an MPA gets regulations that are acceptable to an engaged and supportive community. There is a third approach as well. To further strengthen community support for an MPA, managers are encouraged to harness the power of market forces. This could include fostering profitable alternative livelihoods that are compatible with an MPA’s goals,…

Underlying each edition of MPA News is a question: namely, what are the challenges that MPA practitioners face in aspects of MPA planning and management, and how are they addressing those challenges? Whether a particular article involves building MPA networks, or addressing an oil spill, or partnering with indigenous populations (to name some topics from this year’s issues), the responses from practitioners are enlightening and are woven into the article. Occasionally, however, we take a broader approach, asking practitioners for their insights on the main challenges facing the field. Below are responses from four experts, each of whom answered in…

The Australian Government has released a proposal for a network of eight new MPAs for the country’s South-west marine region. The network would be substantial: it would cover a total area of 538,000 km2, or roughly 40% of the region’s Commonwealth waters, which start 3 nm off the coast. The proposal was released alongside a draft marine bioregional plan for the country’s southwestern waters. Both proposals are now open for public comment. Although the Government refers to the proposed MPAs as “marine reserves”, which often connotes no-take restrictions, the sites would allow extractive activity in some areas. As laid out,…

Larger MPAs generally cost less to manage per unit area than smaller ones, and no-take areas are cheaper to manage than multiple-use MPAs, according to a study by an Australian research team, published in the journal Conservation Letters. The study estimated the management costs of two scenarios for a potential MPA in Australia’s Coral Sea: one a single large no-take area, the other a multi-use MPA of which nearly one third was no-take. The bottom line: annually, it would cost 70% more to manage a large multiple-use MPA than to manage a no-take area of the same size, according to…

Correction In the March-April 2011 issue of MPA News, the article “In Colombian MPA, Management Files Suit to Stop Oil Exploration Inside Boundary” misidentified Marion Howard’s affiliation with CORALINA, the Colombian government environmental authority for the San Andres Archipelago. Marion Howard is MPA advisor to CORALINA, not MPA coordinator. Australia sets new policy on compensating displaced fishers The Australian Government has announced its policy on compensating commercial fishing operators and fishing-dependent communities who are impacted by the designation of new Commonwealth no-take marine reserves. Called the Fisheries Adjustment Policy, it outlines the principles for providing assistance and broadly describes how…

As described to MPA News by Takaomi Kaneko and Mitsutaku Makino, both of Japan’s Fisheries Research Agency: “The majority of Japan’s MPAs are ‘managed resource protected areas’ (IUCN category VI –www.iucn.org/about/work/programmes/pa/pa_products/wcpa_categories) maintained mainly by local Fisheries Cooperative Associations, which are groups of local fishers. FCAs are indispensable for planning, implementing, and monitoring MPAs – especially the autonomous MPAs that are implemented based on local initiatives. However, many facilities for fisheries were destroyed by the quake and tsunami, a lot of FCA members are dead or still missing, and survivors cannot go fishing because they lost their fishing vessels. This means…