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A Global Representative System of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) |
By Professor Graeme G Kelleher AO FTSE
The World Conservation Union, IUCN, is a non-government body based in Switzerland whose mission is to: "influence, encourage and assist societies throughout the world to conserve the integrity and diversity of nature and to ensure that any use of natural resources is equitable and ecologically sustainable". Many of the World's governments as well as non-government organisations are members of IUCN. It has six Commissions, one of which is the Commission on National Parks and Protected Areas (CNPPA).
This article describes the progress that has been made and the future programme to create a global representative system of marine protected areas (MPAs). The term 44 representative" means representative of the World's major biogeographic zones.
It should be noted that Australia has both the largest MPA (the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park) and the greatest number of MPAs of any country in the World. As well, it is recognised as having developed the theory and practice of marine management further than any other country.
Both here and internationally, MPAs are not seen as ends in themselves, but as vital components of Integrated Coastal Management regimes. The primary purposes of such regimes are to contribute to:
- the maintenance of marine biodiversity, and
- the biological productivity of the sea.
Both of these purposes are fundamental to the achievement of ecologically sustainable development. The need for MPAs is increasingly being recognised in the light of repeated failure, both here and globally, of fisheries management based on attempted control of fishing effort and catch. Protected areas are seen as supplements to, not replacements for, these methods. Large, multiple use MPAs covering entire ecosystems, like the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park (GBRMP), provide the organisational framework for integrated management and sustainable development.
I am pursuing these concepts in Australia as well as overseas. I am particularly hopeful that my contact with CSIRO, as chairman of the advisory committee to its Division of Fisheries, will serve to bring the concepts of resource use and conservation closer together.
The first major phase of IUCN's programme to establish a global representative system of marine protected areas was completed with the publication by IUCN in 1991 of Guidelines for Establishing Marine Protected Areas and, in 1995, in association with the World Bank and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA), of the four-volume report A Global Representative System of Marine Protected Areas.
This latter report lists existing marine protected areas in each of the 18 major biogeographic regions into which the World's coastal seas have been divided and identifies priorities, on both regional and national bases, for establishing new MPAs or for improving management in those which exist but are poorly managed or not managed at all. As well, general recommendations are made relating to the protection and sustainable use of marine biological diversity and productivity, with particular emphasis on the need for management regimes which provide for integrated management of ecosystems, either by incorporating complete ecosystems in MPAs or by using MPAs as a component of a wider, integrated system of planning and management.
It is worth noting that these reports were prepared by 18 working groups, consisting of both scientists and managers, one in each of the major biogeographic regions. Together, these working groups constitute what is known as the IUCN's Marine Management Network.
The next (second) phase will consist of two distinct, parallel courses of action:
- Implementing the recommendations in the Report; and
- Applying systematic methods and programmes to establish truly representative regional and national systems of MPAs over the longer-term.
This phase will bring together the expertise and commitment of IUCN, the World Bank, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and, as circumstances permit, the partners, in the GEF-UNEP and UNDR As well, the expertise of members of IUCN, such as the GBRMPA, and of IUCN's six Commissions will be deliberately involved as appropriate. The programme will explicitly aim to involve local communities, and non-government organisations, as has occurred in the preparation of the Report on which it builds.
Two essential elements in this phase will be:
- Refining the data in the Report's data base and making them available on Internet; and
- Further developing bio-geographic classification systems at various scales.
1. Implementing the recommendations in the Report
The elements which will make up this next part of the MPA programme will include;
- planning the process to assist the development by countries/regions of proposals to implement the Report priorities;
- the Marine Management Working Groups developing country specific or, region-specific field project proposals, for submission to the GEF or to some other funding/investment institution; and
- on the receipt of resources, regional or country working groups co-operating with the relevant government(s) to develop individual MPAs in the field, including all the ingredients necessary for successful
MPA management listed below.
I hope that the Marine Management Network will be able to develop at least two field project proposals per year. However, this too will depend on our receiving financial support which is being sought. These field projects will be for the establishment of fully functioning, marine-protected areas and will cover planning, information exchange, management, training, education, research and monitoring. Particular attention will be given to achieving sustainable financing of these MPAs, building on work that has been done by IUCN, the World Bank and other agencies. Advantage will be taken of the project development process to achieve training of country and regional managers and scientists in critical aspects of MPA establishment and management.
A field project proposal will define the project goal, the subordinate objectives and the activities to be carried out in performing the project, as well as the people and organisations responsible for those activities. The means of addressing the GEF or other funding criteria and requirements will be described, particularly regarding country support, global environmental benefits, incremental costs and benefits and priorities, as defined by the Council of Parties to the Convention on Biodiversity and other relevant sources.
Advantage will be taken of other existing or proposed programmes and processes to improve co-ordination, reduce costs and increase benefits. This is already occurring - we are using all of the regional meetings of both the CNPPA and the International Coral Reef Initiative to develop this programme, as well as other regional meetings such as that which was held in Panama 26 - 28 June 1995, under the aegis of the Permanent Commission for the South Pacific (CPPS). As well, we are already working within the framework of UNEP's Regional Seas Programme, especially in SE Asia, the South Pacific, the SE Pacific and the Caribbean and we shall continue to do so.
Much of the "running costs" involved in this proposal will be used to assist the work of local or regional people critical to the success of the programme including assistance to travel to regional planning meetings.
It will be necessary to continuously evaluate priorities, define human and financial resource needs and establish time and cost programmes.
2. Further systematic development of regional and national representative systems of MPAs.
This will be the main function of regional and national working groups in the longer term. With the composition recommended in 3 below, each national working group will be suited to assist and encourage government agencies to develop, adopt and apply national action plans aimed at achieving national representative systems of MPAs and to work with neighbouring countries in developing regionally representative systems. The regional working group will provide a focus for this sort of co-operative action. As suggested above, two important elements in this longer-term programme will be as follows.
Refining the data in the Report's database and making them available on Internet.
The data presented in the Report were obtained from various sources, with varying degrees of accuracy and completeness. In Phase 2 of this programme, there will be a specific objective to update the data and to correct errors. Generally, the most reliable source of information will be national, and one of the functions of each national working group will be to correct and periodically update the data relevant to that country.
The data are presently held in electronic data bases in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority in Canberra, in the World Bank in Washington DC and in the World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge. We are arranging to have these data made available on Internet with Australia's Environmental Resources Information Network (ERIN).
Further developing biogeographic classification systems at various scales.
There is no universally accepted global biogeographic classification system for the marine realm. For this reason and in order to take advantage of the work that had been done historically at country and regional scales, the Report was deliberately based on the classification system that had been used previously in each region or was deemed the most suitable for the particular region. In many but not all regions, this led to the use of the system developed by Hayden, Ray and Dolan (1984). For the South Pacific and other regions, specific regional classifications have been developed. It was not practicable to develop a classification for the Antarctic.
It will be desirable in the future to work towards the development and acceptance of a single global classification system, so that the degree to which biogeographic zones have been represented in MPAs can be determined globally and so that interregional assessments of priorities for creating MPA's can be made.
Further, regional classifications should preferably be compatible with the global system and national classifications should be developed as subsets of regional systems in order to achieve the IUCN goal of national representative systems of MPAs. The regional working groups may be in the best position to contribute to this latter aim, by bringing together experts from countries within the region to encourage the development and adoption of national scale classifications that are compatible with each other and with the regional classification.
3. Organisational Aspects
Eighteen working groups produced the report. A nineteenth has now been established to deal with non-coastal MPAs.
These nineteen working groups need to continue but their membership might have to change to reflect the change in function from investigation to implementation. Functions which can be summarised as regional co-ordination and which they can perform include:
- the development of regional MPA action plans and methodologies,
- the sharing of knowledge, and co-operation in matters affecting more than one country.
Creation of new MPAs and improvement in management will occur largely on a national basis. Therefore, there will be the need to establish national working groups in countries where they do not already exist, in addition to the regional working groups.
Their function in the short term will be to develop and apply strategies and action plans to implement the recommendations in the Report. An effective national working group would probably have to include representatives of,
- federal and state (provincial) government fisheries agencies,
- federal and state government conservation agencies,
- perhaps two non-government organisations, and
- scientific and legal expertise (to the extent that these are not encompassed in the above representation).
Conclusion
Sustainable development has been defined as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs". The historical approach by developed economies to the use of natural resources in the sea have failed to be sustainable because of the factors encapsulated in the phrase "the tragedy of the commons" (Hardin, 1968). The reliance on sectoral management,
which fails to take account of effects of sectoral activities on other sectors, has shown that integrated coastal management is a necessity. Equally, the almost universal failure of traditional fishery management, based on control of fishing effort and/or catch, to prevent stock collapse and ecological damage, shows that new approaches are needed.
Marine protected areas are vital components of integrated coastal management regimes. They can provide almost complete protection of important elements of marine ecosystems and, if large enough, can protect entire ecosystems. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park is the best example of the latter type of MPA, protecting an area larger than the State of Victoria while allowing economic activity worth more than $ 1000 million per year and supporting a fishing industry worth about $3 00 million per year.
Marine protected areas can provide for the needs of the present while ensuring that the ecological process on which all life depends are protected for future generations.
References
Hardin, G. (1968). "The Tragedy of the Common". Science Vol.; 162 pp, 1243-1248.
Hayden, B. P., Ray, G. C., and Dolan, R. (1984). Classification of Coastal and Marine Environments. Environmental Conservation 11(3): 199-207.
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Professor Kelleher is a former Chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Authority and, since 1986, has held the honorary position of Vice-Chairman (Marine) on the IUCN's Commission on National Parks and Protected Areas. He was appointed Conjoint Professor of Systems Engineering, at James Cook University of North Queensland in 1992.
ATSE Focus is a non-refereed publication. The views expressed in the above article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the Academy.
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