Reconciling Tourism Development and Conservation Outcomes Through Marine Spatial Planning for a Saudi Giga-Project in the Red Sea (The Red Sea Project, Vision 2030)

Vasiliki I Chalastani,John Pagano,Ian Williamson,Abhishekh P Vijayan,Faisal Butt,Panos Manetos,Scott D Henshaw,Abdulaziz M Al-Suwailem,Carlos M Duarte,Harry Coccossis,Raed Albaseet,Vasiliki K Tsoukala,Russell E Brainard,Jason A Hale

doi:10.3389/fmars.2020.00168

Abstract

.The Red Sea Project (TRSP) is a development that extends over 28,000 km2 along the shores of the Red Sea that will progress to become a sustainable luxury tourism destination on the west coast of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The destination incorporates the Al Wajh lagoon, a pristine 2,081 km2 area that includes 92 islands with valuable habitats (coral reefs, seagrass and mangroves) and species of global conservation importance. The Red Sea Development Company, responsible for the execution of TRSP, has committed to achieve a net-positive impact on biodiversity while developing the site for sustainable tourism. This requires reaching conservation outcomes superior to those of a “business as usual” scenario for an undeveloped site. After careful optimization of the development plans to explore every opportunity to avoid impacts, we applied Marine Spatial Planning to optimize the conservation of the Al Wajh lagoon in the presence of development. We subsequently tested five conservation scenarios (excluding and including development) using Marxan, a suite of tools designed to identify priority areas for protection on the basis of prescribed conservation objectives. We succeeded in creating a three-layer conservation zoning achieving conservation outcomes as those possible in the “business as usual” scenario. Subsequently, we designed additional actions to remove existing pressures and generate net positive conservation outcomes. The results demonstrate that careful design and planning could potentially allow coastal development to enhance, rather than jeopardize, conservation.

Highlights

The growing activity of humans in the oceans has generated competing demands for ocean marine space, which challenge established institutional governance arrangements
Despite the observation that the selected cells were almost double in amount compared to those of the “Cons_6h” scenario, the cumulative conservation value increased by only 18 units
We identified that the conservation zoning of the The Red Sea Project (TRSP) emerging from the marine spatial planning (MSP) exercise, including iterative workshops to avoid impacts through changes in design and conservation modeling reaches similar conservation outcomes in the presence of development as if the whole area was declared an marine protected areas (MPAs) (1,219 km2 conservation area required)

Summary

Introduction

The growing activity of humans in the oceans has generated competing demands for ocean marine space, which challenge established institutional governance arrangements. Marine spatial planning (MSP) emerged as a policy framework to optimize marine space allocation to various activities to avoid negative interactions, improve synergies, and advance toward a sustainable ocean economy, as reflected in explicit mandates for MSP. Such mandates have not yet been established for any of the areas considered by the Regional Organization for the Conservation of the Environment of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden (PERSGA). MSP is best established, as a governance tool, in Europe, where 37% of all countries apply MSP (Frazão Santos et al, 2019). All relevant EU member states are mandated to have marine spatial plans in place by 2021 (European Commission, 2014)

Methods

Results

Conclusion