Effective governance of a large and complex cross-jurisdictional marine protected area: Australia's Great Barrier Reef

Day, Jon C.; Dobbs, Kirstin

doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2012.12.020

Cited by 104 publications

(63 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…There are major concerns to what extent the governance system will be able to deal with the increasing pressures on the reef (35). The limited success and progress in the GBR have caused UNESCO to discuss including the GBR on the List of World Heritage in Danger (36).…”

Section: Effects On Natural Capitalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptive governance, ecosystem management, and natural capital

Schultz

Folke

Österblom

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

272

186

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To gain insights into the effects of adaptive governance on natural capital, we compare three well-studied initiatives; a landscape in Southern Sweden, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and fisheries in the Southern Ocean. We assess changes in natural capital and ecosystem services related to these social–ecological governance approaches to ecosystem management and investigate their capacity to respond to change and new challenges. The adaptive governance initiatives are compared with other efforts aimed at conservation and sustainable use of natural capital: Natura 2000 in Europe, lobster fisheries in the Gulf of Maine, North America, and fisheries in Europe. In contrast to these efforts, we found that the adaptive governance cases developed capacity to perform ecosystem management, manage multiple ecosystem services, and monitor, communicate, and respond to ecosystem-wide changes at landscape and seascape levels with visible effects on natural capital. They enabled actors to collaborate across diverse interests, sectors, and institutional arrangements and detect opportunities and problems as they developed while nurturing adaptive capacity to deal with them. They all spanned local to international levels of decision making, thus representing multilevel governance systems for managing natural capital. As with any governance system, internal changes and external drivers of global impacts and demands will continue to challenge the long-term success of such initiatives.

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Section: Effects On Natural Capitalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptive governance, ecosystem management, and natural capital

Schultz

Folke

Österblom

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

272

186

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Reef tourism, for instance, is a major income generator for the Region (Stoeckl et al 2011). However tourism impact is concentrated and considered to be minor (GBRMPA 2009;Day and Dobbs 2013). Our analysis has focused on the significant impacts directly addressed by the re-zoning process.…”

Section: Structure Of the Gbrmp Casementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The GBRMP Act (1975) defines the Region as extending from the coastline at low water to six offshore points of latitude and longitude within Australia's Exclusive Economic Zone. The GBRMP covers 99% of the Region and incorporates most coastal waters including that in Queensland government's jurisdiction (Day and Dobbs 2013). Further, the state and federal zoning plans are contiguous and don't distinguish the state-federal marine park boundaries.…”

Section: Design Principlesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ongoing, there are a few rules that apply to resource users to ensure they contribute to the sustainable provision of ecosystem services, for instance: commercial vessels are obliged to compile daily fishing logbooks; trawl vessels are required to install vessel location monitoring systems to enhance ecological and compliance monitoring; and commercial and recreational fishers with TACC quota are required to log a fishing trip before going and to report their catch before landing to enable random checks at port. There is also increasing participation in voluntary provisioning activities such as stewardship and education programs (Day and Dobbs 2013). To what extent these are proportional to the rights and benefits of appropriation is difficult to ascertain in this case.…”

Section: Design Principlesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The re-zoning process was informed by a ten-year seascape-level experiment on 24 reefs conducted to test opening and closure regimes on reefs (Mapstone et al 2004;Hughes et al 2007b). Long term biological monitoring of the reef has been a key success and source of knowledge on reef status (decline and improvement), allowing for a re-thinking of the initial zoning plan and adaptive management to date (McCook et al 2010;Day and Dobbs 2013). Fish catch monitoring is less widespread or effective.…”

Section: Monitoringmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Keeping the ‘Great’ in the Great Barrier Reef: large-scale governance of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park

Evans¹,

Ban²,

Schoon³

et al. 2014

Int J Commons

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Abstract:As part of an international collaboration to compare large-scale commons, we used the Social-Ecological Systems Meta-Analysis Database (SESMAD) to systematically map out attributes of and changes in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park (GBRMP) in Australia. We focus on eight design principles from common-pool resource (CPR) theory and other key social-ecological systems governance variables, and explore to what extent they help explain the social and ecological outcomes of park management through time. Our analysis showed that commercial fisheries management and the re-zoning of the GBRMP in 2004 led to improvements in ecological condition of the reef, particularly fisheries. These boundary and rights changes were supported by effective monitoring, sanctioning and conflict resolution. Moderate biophysical connectivity was also important Keeping the 'Great' in the Great Barrier Reef 397 for improved outcomes. However, our analysis also highlighted that continued challenges to improved ecological health in terms of coral cover and biodiversity can be explained by fuzzy boundaries between land and sea, and the significance of external drivers to even large-scale social-ecological systems (SES). While ecological and institutional fit in the marine SES was high, this was not the case when considering the coastal SES. Nested governance arrangements become even more important at this larger scale. To our knowledge, our paper provides the first analysis linking the re-zoning of the GBRMP to CPR and SES theory. We discuss important challenges to coding large-scale systems for meta-analysis.Keywords: Coral reefs, fisheries, Great Barrier Reef, large-scale, marine, socialecological system Acknowledgements: The authors would like to thank the SESMAD team for their support and collaboration, in particular Michael Cox. LE and NB acknowledge funding support from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. NB also thanks NSERC and SSHRC for financial support. Finally, we are grateful to those who reviewed our paper, including three anonymous reviewers. The arguments developed here are the sole responsibility of the authors.

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Rapid declines across Australian fishery stocks indicate global sustainability targets will not be achieved without an expanded network of ‘no‐fishing’ reserves

Edgar

Ward

Stuart‐Smith

2018

Aquatic Conservation

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Abstract1. A continuing debate between environmental scientists and fisheries biologists on the sustainability of fisheries management practices, and the extent of fishing impacts on marine ecosystems, is unlikely to be resolved without fisheryindependent data spanning large geographic and temporal scales. Here, we compare continental-and decadal-scale trends in fisheries catches with underwater reef monitoring data for 533 sites around Australia, and find matching evidence of rapid fish-stock declines.2. Regardless of a high global ranking for fisheries sustainability, catches from Australian wild fisheries decreased by 31% over the past decade. The biomass of large fishes observed on underwater transects decreased significantly over the same period on fished reefs (36% decline) and in marine park zones that allow limited fishing (18% decline), but with a negligible overall change in no-fishing marine reserves. Populations of exploited fishes generally rose within marine reserves and declined outside the reserves, whereas unexploited species showed little difference in population trends within or outside reserves.3. Although changing climate and more precautionary fisheries management contribute to declining fish catches, fisheries-independent transect data suggest that excessive fishing also plays a major role.4. The large number of fishery stocks that remain unmanaged or have poor data, coupled with continuing declines in the stock biomass of managed fish species, indicate that Aichi Target 6 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (i.e. 'by 2020, all fish and invertebrate stocks and aquatic plants are managed and harvested sustainably') will not be achieved in Australia, or elsewhere.5. In order to maintain some naturally functioning food webs supported by large predators and associated ecosystem services in this era of changing climate, a greatly expanded network of effective, fully protected marine protected areas is needed that encompasses global marine biodiversity. The present globally unbalanced situation, with >98% of seas open to some form of fishing, deserves immediate multinational attention.

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Effective governance of a large and complex cross-jurisdictional marine protected area: Australia's Great Barrier Reef

Cited by 104 publications

References 17 publications

Adaptive governance, ecosystem management, and natural capital

Adaptive governance, ecosystem management, and natural capital

Keeping the ‘Great’ in the Great Barrier Reef: large-scale governance of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park

Rapid declines across Australian fishery stocks indicate global sustainability targets will not be achieved without an expanded network of ‘no‐fishing’ reserves

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