Abstract
Healthy marine ecosystems provide a wide range of resources and services that support life on Earth and contribute to human wellbeing. Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are accepted as an important tool for the restoration and maintenance of marine ecosystem structure, function, health and ecosystem integrity through the conservation of significant species, habitats, or entire ecosystems. In recent years there has been a rapid expansion in the area of ocean designated as an MPA. Despite this progress in spatial protection targets and the progressive knowledge of the essential interdependence between the human and the ocean system, marine biodiversity continues to decline, placing in jeopardy the range of ecosystem services benefits humans rely on. There is a need to address this shortcoming. Ambitious marine conservation:• Requires a shift from managing individual marine features within MPAs to whole-sites to enable repair and renewal of marine systems;• Reflects an ambition for sustainable livelihoods by fully integrating fisheries management with conservation (Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management) as the two are critically interdependent;• Establishes a world class and cost effective ecological and socio-economic monitoring and evaluation framework that includes the use of controls and sentinel sites to improve sustainability in marine management; and• Challenges policy makers and practitioners to be progressive by integrating MPAs into the wider seascape as critical functional components rather than a competing interest and move beyond MPAs as the only tool to underpin the benefits derived from marine ecosystems by identifying other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs) to establish synergies with wider governance frameworks.
Highlights
Marine ecosystems provide a wide range of resources and services that contribute to the survival of life on Earth and human well-being [1]
Several researchers have argued that the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) spatial area target of 10% of marine areas to designated as Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), is too low to achieve the objective of protecting biodiversity, underpinning ecosystem services and meeting socio-economic priorities [19]
This paper offers a concise synthesis of four emergent themes in MPA science relevant for policy makers to address the challenge of protecting biodiversity, underpinning ecosystem services and meeting socioeconomic priorities
Summary
Marine ecosystems provide a wide range of resources and services that contribute to the survival of life on Earth and human well-being [1]. Whilst there are diverging views on the positives and negatives of the UK’s departure from the EU for marine biodiversity protection [40,133], the bottom line is that the UK’s departure from the EU has not just the potential to change, in midstream, the direction of travel of much UK legislation that underpins the conservation of marine ecosystems, but is set to replace an established constitutional framework around UK marine environmental law, with a devolved system of governance, which may result in differing cross-border strategic objectives for conservation [41] This large-scale legal and regulatory change resulting from the potential EU departure has been met with a raft of policy reform including the release of the Government’s A Green Future: Our 25 Year Plan to Improve the Environment (25YEP) [37], the advent of a new UK Marine Strategy [42], a Fisheries Bill, and an Environment Bill which was introduced to UK parliament in January 2020. We aim to inform future policy direction in both the UK and internationally to support an improved framework for marine biodiversity protection that enables sustainable development and underpins human well-being
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