Opportunities and constraints for implementing integrated land–sea management on islands

Abstract

Despite a growing body of literature on integrated land-sea management (ILSM), very little critical assessment has been conducted in order to evaluate ILSM in practice on island systems. Here we develop indicators for assessing 10 integrated island management principles and evaluate the performance of planning and implementation in four island ILSM projects from the tropical Pacific across different governance structures. We find that where customary governance is still strongly respected and enabled through national legislation, ILSM in practice can be very effective at restricting access and use according to fluctuations in resource availability. However, decision-making under customary governance systems may be vulnerable to mismanagement. Governmentled ILSM processes have the potential to design management actions that address the spatial scale of ecosystem processes and threats within the context of national policy and legislation, but may not fully capture broad stakeholder interests, and implementation may be poorly coordinated across highly dispersed island archipelagos. Private sector partnerships offer unique opportunities for resourcing island ILSM, although these are highly likely to be geared towards private sector interests that may change in the future and no longer align with community and/or national objectives. We identify consistent challenges that arise during

Linking Land and Sea through Collaborative Research to Inform Contemporary applications of Traditional Resource Management in Hawai‘i

“…Pacific Islands are ideal systems to understand land-sea links in the context of social-ecological system resilience [1][2][3], defined as the capacity of the system to cope with disturbances without shifting to an alternative state while maintaining its functions and supporting human uses [4,5]. Around the Pacific Islands [6,7], local knowledge and associated management practices (e.g., agroforestry, fisheries management) have been recognized to play a key role in building resilience to disturbances [8][9][10].…”

“…In ICCAs, local people, who are intimately connected to the environment, culturally and/or through their livelihoods make decisions over how resources are used and have the capability to enforce regulations, which can lead to effective conservation outcomes (even if conservation is not the primary objective) [22,23]. Ridge-to-reef management systems that integrate LEK can enhance social-ecological resilience through reducing impact from climate disturbances and strengthening governance systems with capacity to quickly organize and act [2]. These types of ICCAs offer lessons in integrating traditional knowledge and management practices into sustainability and conservation planning but require national level legal and policy changes to accommodate and empower the ICCAs operating at the watershed-reef level [8,24].…”

Land Use Impacts on Coral Reef Health: A Ridge-to-Reef Perspective

“…Land-sea connectivity is particularly strong on high volcanic islands due to several unique features of island ecology. First, islands contain erosive andesite soils and small, steep watersheds, where each unit of land-use change can heavily impact coastal water quality (Verbist et al, 2010;Jupiter et al, 2017). In addition, a temporal mismatch between tropical rainfall patterns and wave dynamics can prevent sediment from dispersing offshore.…”

“…In addition, land conservation invites a new suite of socioeconomic interests and stakeholder groups into the marine planning process, and terrestrial and marine values may prioritize different spaces for conservation (Klein et al, 2014). Nonetheless, in recent years, a community of practice surrounding ridge-to-reef protection has emerged, introducing new methods and advances to landsea planning (Beger et al, 2010;Álvarez-Romero et al, 2015;Jupiter et al, 2017;Oleson et al, 2017;Saunders et al, 2017;Delevaux et al, 2018a,b,c).…”

“…Extensive research documents coral physiology and community responses to land-based pollutants (Fabricius, 2005;Erftemeijer et al, 2012), the hydrologic fate and transport of pollutants from land to reef (Brodie et al, 2010;Knee et al, 2016;Margvelashvili et al, 2018), and oceanographic processes affecting sediment and nutrient dispersal (Storlazzi et al, 2004(Storlazzi et al, , 2009Carter et al, 2009;Fabricius et al, 2014). Applied conservation research also addresses barriers to joint land-sea policymaking (Jupiter et al, 2017), social-ecological systems underpinning sustainable ridge-to-reef use (Delevaux et al, 2018c;Winter et al, 2018), and, while this literature is still nascent, quantitative tradeoff analyses to select conservation areas across land and sea (Tallis et al, 2008;Makino et al, 2013;Álvarez-Romero et al, 2015;Oleson et al, 2017). However, to date, no study has explicitly reviewed the state of current knowledge on the relationship between land use and coral condition.…”