Stakeholders’ perceptions on environmental quality and threats to subtropical marine reserves

Abstract

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) have been one of the main strategies for the conservation of marine ecosystems and an attempt to buffer or revert anthropogenic and natural disturbances. However, only the implementation of an MPA does not guarantee effectiveness in the maintenance of these environments. The involvement of the stakeholders in the whole process is crucial for the MPAs to achieve their conservation goals. With this, we provide here an understanding of the dynamics on how different stakeholders engage in marine reserves management, to inform courses of action and improve conservation and governance at multiple scales. Through semi-structured questionnaires, we investigated which anthropogenic threats were mostly perceived by stakeholders in three Brazilian marine reserves. We compare the perceptions of the members of the management councils and the staff of each reserve, in addition to verifying whether there were differences among their perceptions and to identify correlations between perceptions on management effectiveness and environmental quality. Illegal fishing and exotic species were the most important threats identified. No differences were verified between the perceptions of managers and members of the management board of the marine reserve and there was also no relationship between the perception of effectiveness and quality of environmental attributes. The different stakeholders’ interests and their socioeconomic and cultural background is discussed as influencing the perceptions of management effectiveness. However, the similarity in threat perceptions reported in this study may be explained by the lower level of complexity and subjectivity in opinions in comparison with management effectiveness evaluations. Our results provide an overview of perceptions on threats and on the environmental quality of subtropical marine reserves in the Southwestern Atlantic, which can be used to guide funding and policy priorities that mitigate the effects of anthropogenic threats on marine reserves and thus contribute to creating a win–win scenario.