Economics of Marine Protected Areas: Assessing the Literature for Marine Protected Area Network Expansions

Abstract

Marine protected areas (MPAs) provide both conservation and economic benefits. Recent international conservation actors have called for a dramatic increase in the area of MPAs from almost 8% to 30% of marine area by 2030 in a policy called 30X30. Both the economics and conservation science literatures consider MPA decisions and MPA impact, although the economics literature focuses on fishery economic outcomes. This review uses an optimization framework for MPA decisions as a lens through which to evaluate the economics literature on MPAs in the context of the 30X30 expansion decisions. We argue for more economic analysis of MPA policy questions, including those around siting, design, restrictions, and management choices; impact evaluation; responses of people; low-income country settings and incomplete enforcement; spatial settings without metapopulations; and conservation rather than harvest objectives. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Resource Economics, Volume 14 is October 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Building a Practical Multi-Sensor Platform for Monitoring Vessel Activity near Marine Protected Areas: Case Studies from Urban and Remote Locations

“…See Figure 9 for image examples. The final determined width is converted to degrees per pixel using target distance (3), which is then used with the lens calibration Equations ( 4) and ( 5) to calculate a zoom percentage (6). If the percentage is outside 0-100%, then the zoom is set to the minimum or maximum, respectively.…”

“…These spatial goals require monitoring vast areas of the ocean [2,3], which can be supported by satellite-borne remote sensing (e.g., [4,5]). But small-scale, locally managed MPAs also require special attention due to their role in the economies of coastal communities [6]. These MPAs can enhance fish biomass [7] and support local food security [8], but limited staffing and budget capacity for monitoring are pervasive issues [9,10].…”

Global expansion of marine protected areas and the redistribution of fishing effort

“…Causal inference methods have been effective in examining regional effects of individual marine protection policies ( 15 – 18 ), but these methods require an unaffected control group, which by definition does not exist for a policy that induces global effects. As a result, simulations of large-scale MPA expansions have relied on heuristic assumptions of fisher responses, such as assuming no change outside MPAs or a uniform reallocation of effort from within MPAs to areas outside ( 19 – 23 ). This approach provides an “all else equal” reference point, but it is an assumed scenario, not an empirically driven response, so does not capture the true net effect of the policy.…”

A deeper dive into the blue economy: the role of the diving sector in conservation and sustainable development goals

“…SDG14 aims for larger Marine Protected Area (MPA) networks worldwide, and the Convention on Biological Diversity has called for MPAs to increase to 30% of marine areas by 2030, in a plan called 30X30 (Roberts et al, 2020;Grorud-Colvert et al, 2021). However, conservation efforts must be carefully planned to avoid protecting areas that may be lower priority from a biodiversity perspective because they do not create conflicts with extractive industries (Dinerstein et al, 2019), and to prevent establishing ineffective "paper parks" (Grorud-Colvert et al, 2021;Albers and Ashworth, 2022). We suggest a framework to promote wider engagement by the diving sector in conservation and sustainable development efforts, thereby supporting SDGs and the Blue Economy.…”