Marine Protected Areas Tools for Sustaining Ocean Ecosystems (2001) / Chapter Skim
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Societal Values of Marine Reserves and Protected Areas
Societal Values of Marine Reserves and Protected Areas
Pages 42-70
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From page 42... ...
and reserves is likely to alter both the kinds of benefits or ecosystem services provided by the marine environment and the distribution of these benefits among different groups and individuals. Because the United States government has public trust responsibilities to manage federal waters for the interests of citizens nationwide, assessment of the various costs and benefits of establishing MPAs requires evaluation of public opinion from both direct users and citizens concerned about marine conservation.
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From page 43... ...
This chapter describes these different types of values, the potential costs and benefits of MPAs in supporting these values, methods for evaluating societal values, and finally the need for community involvement in the decisionmaking process. ORIGIN OF THE VALUES ASSOCIATED WITH MARINE ECOSYSTEMS The "natural" functioning of marine ecosystems has included human influences for significant periods of time (Zacharias et al., 1998~.
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From page 44... ...
These international trends, reflecting preferences for improving environmental protection, suggest that public values worldwide may support ocean conservation measures such as MPAs, based on environmental ethics alone. How do these attitudes apply to the specific case of conservation in marine ecosystems?
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From page 45... ...
Significantly, environmental values have become integrated with core American values such as parental responsibility, obligations to descendants, and traditional religious teachings. Cultural Landscapes Human values associated with marine ecosystems are related to understanding the relationships between components of the ecosystem and processes of change that occur (Kempton et al., 1995~.
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From page 46... ...
Marine cultural landscapes reflect the way humans use and value various ecological zones in the sea and along the coast. Some of these cultural landscapes will more or less reflect the geographic boundaries of marine ecosystems and the diversity within them.
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From page 47... ...
Policy Context Direct users of marine resources attain access to services provided by marine ecosystems through public policies that place conditions on access rights and set regulations for various uses. For example, nearly every coastal nation has instituted fishery regulations that, in principle, protect and sustain the economic benefits available to commercial fishers.
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From page 48... ...
These groups have recently become more vocal and successful in the political process, manifesting a shift in public environmental priorities. Current user groups frequently claim rights and protections to the use of living marine resources, analogous to the homesteading farmer's title to land, because use creates a source of income and wealth.
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From page 49... ...
However, marine reserves may be the only method for preserving unique habitats and ecosystems. Measuring Non-Market Benefits Some of the services provided by marine ecosystems have market prices that can be adjusted to reflect their direct economic value.
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From page 50... ...
Market prices also may not give the correct "signals" about values that might be associated with either marine products or marine ecosystem services in the future. The challenge is to derive methods that can be used as market value "proxies" to assess an ecosystem's current nonmarket values where possible and to adapt those methods to predict what the values might be for future generations.
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From page 51... ...
It is likely, in fact, that the market values of a whale-watching trip far exceed the market values associated with whale meat. Whales also have value through their ecological role in maintaining the natural abundance of other marine species, including commercially valuable fisheries.
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From page 52... ...
From these examples, there are at least four categories of values that marine ecosystems might provide with implementation of MPAs: 1. Market values associated with consumptive uses, such as the value of
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From page 54... ...
Despite such beliefs, legal precedents on public trust resources suggest that the establishment of reserves would not be recognized as a taking, and fishery managers already use closed areas as one tool of fisheries management. It is obvious that the acceptability of reserves is inversely related to their
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From page 55... ...
Models that compare conventional management methods with reserves suggest that under some circumstances, fishery reserves can provide maximum yields identical to conventional management. Hastings and Botsford (1999)
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From page 58... ...
Clearly, standard management methods, such as effort controls (gear restrictions, days at sea, limited entry, etc.) and catch quotas, and spatial management methods (including fixed and rotating harvest zones, permanent reserves)
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From page 60... ...
Under certain circumstances, reserves could provide the same mean yield as conventional methods, but with greater protection against severe overexploitation or fluctuations of environmental conditions (Agardy, 2000~. ECONOMIC INCENTIVES As described above, the benefits and costs of marine reserves are intricately bound up with perceived and de facto property rights to marine resources.
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From page 61... ...
mandates that rebuilding plans be implemented, user groups will be required to incur the upfront costs associated with whatever methods are chosen to rebuild the fishery, and it is only a question of whether fishery reserves will be more effective than other management methods that uniformly reduce harvest throughout the area. However, even though overexploited fisheries appear to be logical choices in terms of the relative ease of implementing reserves, there are drawbacks to focusing only on overexploited fisheries.
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From page 62... ...
Second, as discussed earlier, many of the public good benefits associated with marine systems tend to be underrepresented in political processes, with the result that the political system tends to undersupply services such as scientific knowledge, heritage values, existence values, and option values associated with environmental sustainability. Taken together, a critical issue in marine resource management is how to address the problem of common-pool resources to more effectively implement conservation measures, including marine reserves.
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From page 63... ...
More studies of this type will be needed to complete a cost-benefit analysis of marine reserves. Cost-Benefit Analysis of Marine Reserves Versus Conventional Management The costs and benefits of marine reserves versus conventional management methods have not been thoroughly examined.
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From page 66... ...
COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT Natural Resource Partnerships Successful natural resource partnerships can be formed to implement MPAs if the potential partners can be identified and organized. Systematic social science research can contribute to identifying these partnerships by clarifying cultural differences in natural resource use, such as traditional ties of each group to marine ecosystems, knowledge, conservation ethics, and degree of compliance with laws and regulations.
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From page 67... ...
The issue of community management of marine ecosystems often dominates discussions about establishing MPAs. Most marine users perceive they have rights, however established, to features of the marine ecosystem that they use or to which they have become personally and culturally attached.
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From page 68... ...
Implementing integrated management strategies to achieve the objectives of the World Conservation Strategy in the coastal and marine environment and in so doing to consider local resource needs as well as national and international conservation and development responsibilities in the protection of the marine environment; by Involving local people, non-governmental organizations, related industries and other interested parties in the development of these strategies and in the implementation of various marine conservation programmer.
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From page 69... ...
The outline of the method used is set out in IUCN' s Guidelines for Establishing Marine Protected Areas (Kelleher and Kenchington, 1992~. It exemplifies the sequential approach in that it was based on scientific considerations, without explicitly considering socioeconomic issues.
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From page 70... ...
Nevertheless, there are strategic principles which are virtually universally applicable. One such principle is that a marine protected area is likely to be successful only if the local people are directly involved in its selection, establishment and management.
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