Abstract
Marine protected areas (MPAs) design is a complex process that typically involves diverse stakeholders, requiring compromise between diverging priorities. Such compromises, when not carefully understood, can threaten the ecological effectiveness of MPAs. Using the example of the Canadian Laurentian Channel MPA, we studied a planning process from initial scientific advice to the final MPA. We analysed the impacts of successive boundary modifications to the draft MPA, often made to accommodate extractive industries, on the protection of seven species initially identified as potential conservation priorities. We also quantified the potential economic impacts of changes in boundary modifications on the fisheries industry. Results show that reducing the proposed MPA size by 33.4% helped reduce the potential economic impact on the fishing industry by 65.5%, but it resulted in up to 43% decrease in protection of species of conservation priority. Changes in MPA boundary delineation during the design were not subjected to formal scientific reviews, raising questions on the potential effectiveness of this MPA. Better integration of science in MPA design is required to help assess the impacts that trade-offs made during stakeholder consultations can have on the MPA ecological effectiveness.
Highlights
With a rising global population that relies on a broad range of natural resources, humans increasingly impact marine environments (Halpern et al 2008), leading to large and rapid declines in marine biodiversity across the globe (Johnson et al 2017)
This was the case for the Laurentian Channel (LC) marine protected areas (MPAs) that was selected from a set of candidate sites identified by a scientific process for their ecological and biological significance
Such context is common internationally, as efforts led by the United Nations (UN) in the past decade have aimed at identifying UN ecologically and biologically significant area (EBSA) that can be used as a basis for MPA selection (Dunn et al 2014)
Summary
With a rising global population that relies on a broad range of natural resources, humans increasingly impact marine environments (Halpern et al 2008), leading to large and rapid declines in marine biodiversity across the globe (Johnson et al 2017). At least slow down this decline, conservation actions are taking place from local to international levels. Amongst those actions, marine protected areas (MPAs) are widely considered as the cornerstone of most national marine conservation strategies. International conservation targets, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity Aichi targets (CBD 2011) and the United Nations sustainable development goals. This increase in the creation of new MPAs brings to light growing conflicts between society’s dependence on natural resources and the need to protect nature
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