Abstracts from the World Conference on Marine Biodiversity. Aberdeen, September 24-29, 2011.[1]
Marine Protected Areas: A sea change in perception, policy and the law
Dr Jean-Luc Solandt, Sue Ranger,
Marine Conservation Society, Ross on Wye, Herefordshire, UK
Email: jls@mcsuk.org Tel: 01989 566 017
Given the interest amongst scientists, governments, sea users and increasingly the general public in marine resource use, the Marine Conservation Society convened the Marine Protected Areas sessions at the WCMB 2011 in Aberdeen. The six sessions on MPAs covered four of the five days of the conference, and involved 26 papers from 12 countries and 5 continents (Europe; Africa; Asia; Australia; Asia; and The Americas). All abstracts of the papers presented are linked to below.
MPAs are a developing tool for managers of the marine environment to use to recover and protect fish stocks and marine biodiversity. The scale of MPAs has exponentially increased in the past decade, both in the developing and developed world (e.g. the UK Overseas Territories, Chagos reserve; The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority; and the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands). Politicians are designating MPAs to deliver on sustainability and biodiversity targets, whilst the more traditional role of Marine Protected Areas as fisheries management tools has been investigated in depth by programme such as the European EMPAFISH project, and meta-analyses of marine reserve performance by the PISCO group.
The WCMB sessions on Marine Protected Areas was designed to take stock of current use of MPAs, the ecological and socio-economic results of protected area mechanisms, governance, the legal and political drivers for MPAs, and the use of stakeholders and ecological data in designating MPAs. Papers presented at this conference were dominated by designation processes. This comes at a time when the World Summit on Sustainable Development target for signatory states to designate well-managed networks of MPAs by 2012 is on the horizon. Plans to increase the number of sites to develop networks of MPAs were discussed from a wide range of countries, that included Scotland, England, Germany, Spain, Portugal, EU, OSPAR, South Africa, and Indonesia.
The conference sessions were on the following topics (please click on these areas to go to relevant papers presented):
- Governance.
-
Stakeholder engagement.
-
Legislation and policy.
-
MPAs as a recovery mechanism for fisheries and biodiversity.
-
Designing MPAs and MPA networks.
[1] Sponsorship for the event came from the Marine Conservation Society and the University of the West of England
