MPA News
Balancing Ecology and Economics: Lessons Learned from the Planning of a Marine Reserve Network in the Channel Islands (US)
In the past year, milestones were reached in two high-profile processes to create representative systems of marine protected areas. In the Australian state of Victoria and in the Channel Islands of the US state of California, government officials approved plans for networks of new MPAs, concluding lengthy and contentious planning efforts in both cases. Both processes offer lessons to practitioners and stakeholders elsewhere who face similar challenges in planning MPA networks. In a two-part series, MPA News distills lessons learned from each process by examining the obstacles encountered and how participants might have improved the processes in retrospect. Part one…
MPA Perspective: Conserving Ecological Integrity of Marine Reserves: “No-Take” Is Not Necessarily “Fully Protected”
Editor’s note: William Alevizon, author of the following perspective piece, is a senior marine ecologist with the marine conservation program of the Wildlife Conservation Society, a US-based NGO. A specialist in population and community ecology of reef fishes, Alevizon has conducted ecological investigations of Caribbean and Florida reef habitats and fisheries since 1973, and has authored or co-authored numerous scientific papers and technical reports. He has participated in MPA planning efforts in several Caribbean nations, including Antigua, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Nicaragua. For the past two years, Alevizon has worked closely with the Bahamas Department of Fisheries to develop…
Notes & News
More information on women and MPAs Readers who want to learn more about the subject of women and MPAs – featured in last month’s MPA News – may refer to the Women in Fisheries bulletin, published by the Secretariat of the Pacific Community. The November 2002 edition features several articles on women’s roles in community-based management and conservation in Pacific island nations. The issue is available online at http://www.spc.int/coastfish/News/WIF/WIF11/WIF11.htm. Insurer ruled liable for damages from Galapagos spill A court in Ecuador has ruled that Terra Nova, a British insurance underwriter, must pay a total of US$10 million to the Galapagos…
Women and MPAs: How Gender Affects Roles in Planning and Management
Knowledge of how people interact with each other and with their environment is a necessary component of effective resource policy. Policymaking, including for MPAs, appears to be most informed and innovative when it is open to the views and experience of all stakeholders. However, despite their involvement in the use of coastal and marine resources around the world, many women face barriers to participating fully in the planning and management of those resources. Such barriers can be institutional, educational, or cultural in nature, and can profoundly influence decisionmaking that affects the welfare of marine resources and coastal communities. This month,…
Interview with Marion Howard: Gender as a Factor in Community-Based MPA Work
Marion Howard is MPA advisor for CORALINA, a Colombian government agency that manages the natural resources and sustainable development of Colombia’s San Andres Archipelago, designated by UNESCO in 2000 as the Seaflower Biosphere Reserve. Howard has been overseeing a project to develop a network of marine protected areas within the biosphere reserve, which has an estimated population of more than 80,000 people. Although not a Colombian, she has lived in the San Andres Archipelago for 25 years; she is the only non-national at CORALINA. MPA News interviewed her about how her project incorporates gender concerns in its work. MPA News:…
Shrimpers and Mexican Government Compromise on Fishing in Reserve
Mexican government officials reached agreement with shrimp trawlers in late October in a contentious dispute over fishing restrictions in a marine reserve. The agreement, which allows trawlers to resume harvesting shrimp in the Upper Gulf of California and Colorado River Delta Biosphere Reserve, ended community protests that had blocked the movement of hundreds of tourists between Mexico and the USA. The dispute was sparked in September when Mexico’s environment secretariat announced an emergency law to prohibit trawling in the reserve and restrict the types of gillnets allowed. The measures were intended to protect benthic habitat and reduce bycatch of endangered…
Letter to the Editor
Dear MPA News: In the lead article in the October 2002 MPA News (“Measuring the Effects of Marine Reserves on Fisheries: The Dilemmas of Experimental Programs”), Ray Hilborn raised concern about the design of appropriate experiments to evaluate the impact of marine reserves. He noted that most studies to date “have not involved sufficiently rigorous experimental design,” and that current research on reserve effects suffers from two internal biases: (1) current protected areas were “almost certainly selected for protection because of their higher productivity,” and (2) effort excluded from the reserve area will be “redirected to the unprotected areas,” thereby…
Notes & News
Leasing submerged lands: new conservation tool? Leasing or acquiring submerged lands may provide a valuable new tool for coastal and marine conservation, particularly when paired with shellfish restoration, according to a new report from The Nature Conservancy (TNC), a US-based nongovernmental organization. The 32-page report Leasing and Restoration of Submerged Lands: Strategies for Community-Based, Watershed-Scale Conservation suggests such strategies could provide several benefits, including long-term habitat protection, restoration of ecological processes in coastal watersheds, and economic benefits for local communities and fishermen. The report is downloadable for free from the TNC website at http://nature.org/files/lease_sub_lands.pdf. “It is commonly assumed that strategies…
Measuring the Effects of Marine Reserves on Fisheries: The Dilemmas of Experimental Programs
In theory, no-take marine reserves hold benefits for nearby fisheries: the reserves allow target species to grow older and larger, produce more young, and ultimately replenish fished areas with larvae and/or adults. While evidence of benefits to fisheries has appeared in scientific literature, some researchers argue that most science on reserves has not involved sufficiently rigorous experimental design, including the use of control sites. As a result, they say, there is an urgent need for experimental programs to clarify the fisheries benefits – and costs, for that matter – of marine reserves. But conducting rigorous experiments on reserves brings an…
Australia Designates World’s Largest No-Take Area
In a move to protect the waters of one of the most remote places on Earth, Australia has designated a giant marine reserve around an island group just outside the Antarctic Circle. At 65,000 km2, the Heard Island and McDonald Islands Marine Reserve is the world’s largest no-take area – roughly the size of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg combined. The Australian territory of Heard Island and McDonald Islands (HIMI) lies equidistant from Australia and South Africa in the southern Indian Ocean. Licensed fishing there by Australians started in 1997, trawling for Patagonian toothfish and mackerel icefish. Although management has…