Growing int’l support for Marine Protected Areas

Last week, nearly 800 delegates from over 70 countries, including the CNMI and Guam, gathered near Melbourne, Australia to discuss one of the hottest topics in natural resource management: marine protected areas. Marine protected areas, more commonly referred to as “MPAs,” are, in many places, highly supported by local communities, while in others, they are a highly controversial management tool that has generated contentious debates between managers and user groups. Why the difference?

Last week’s conference, the “First International Marine Protected Areas Congress,” gave people from countries around the globe to share their experiences and lessons learned with MPAs to help answer this and many other questions. The “good news” coming out of the conference is that MPAs, in general, are working. The use of MPAs is growing, and the news from over 70 countries around the globe is that they are working: they are rebuilding depleted fish stocks, they are rebuilding and protecting important habitats, they are protecting important nursery grounds and nesting areas, they are protecting spawning aggregations, they are protecting coral reefs from a variety of threats, and, best of all, they are now being designed and created in such a way to minimize the negative impacts on important users, such as fishermen, divers, and tourists. More good news coming from the conference is that the MPAs are doing more than “protecting”, they are also producing positive benefits outside of MPA boundaries. Due to improvements in MPA design (where MPAs should go and how they are connected, for example, by currents), MPAs are acting as small reproductive factories that are helping seed neighboring areas with juvenile fish and corals.

The “bad news” coming out of the conference is that, although there are over 6,000 MPAs worldwide, very little of our global oceans (0.6 percent) have been set aside and protected with MPAs of any kind, and even fewer (0.08 percent) protected with no-take MPAs where fishing and other extraction is prohibited. Here in the CNMI, although we have made some progress on Saipan, we have a very small percentage of the CNMI’s waters protected by MPAs, and our existing MPAs do not cover all of our important and varied marine habitat types. In 2002, 2003, and 2004 at three international conferences on sustainable development, commitments were made by governments to establish representative networks of MPAs that protect at least 20 percent of each marine habitat by the year 2012. According to one conference presenter, at the current rate of MPA establishment, we won’t reach that goal until the year 2085! More “bad news” came in the form of scientists admitting that, despite huge advances in knowledge in recent history, we really have just begun to understand the complexities of our oceans, especially the complex deep sea ecosystems like the ones found off the back side of the island in the Mariana Trench’s Challenger Deep, the deepest place on earth. (One famous explorer/presenter, Sylvia Earle, mentioned that we currently only have five deep sea submersibles that are capable of traveling to half the depth of the Challenger Deep, and not a single one that can make it to the bottom.) There is so much we don’t know about our oceans, for example, how the amazing (and delicious) tuna can travel at the speed of a nuclear submarine on just a simple fish diet (MIT researchers were stumped). We don’t know enough about isolated seamounts, like the many found offshore our islands here in the CNMI, and the high occurrence of endemic species found there and nowhere else in the world. We don’t know what effect 6 billion hungry people (and rising), 40 percent of which are living along the coast, are going to have on our oceans’ ecosystems as they continue to extract wildlife out of the sea at alarming rates. Despite all we don’t know, the consensus at this conference seemed to be that if we wait until we do know everything, it will be too late to do anything at all.

Before I delve into the many topics that were discussed at the conference, I want to clarify exactly what an MPA, or marine protected area, is. There is a long wordy definition used by the international community, and another used by the US, and even a few more used by other groups. The bottom line is that an MPA is to the ocean what a “park” is to the land. They are areas set up to protect the ocean waters and the things that live in them. It’s not quite that simple, however, as there are a variety of different types of MPAs out there. Just like on land, where you might have a “state park” or a “national park”, there are MPAs in the water that are managed by state or territorial governments (like the ones we have here in the CNMI) and there are MPAs in the water that are managed by the federal government (like the National Park Service, or NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). Guam has some examples of federally managed MPAs. In fact, there are even MPAs that have been established by and that are managed by local communities. Some of our neighbors such as the Philippines and Palau have examples of these types of MPAs, created by local fishing communities and traditional reef owners. To make things even more confusing, these “MPAs” go by a number of different names. Even here on Saipan we have three different names for our MPAs: Marine Sanctuary (Bird Island and Forbidden Island), Marine Conservation Area (Managaha Island), and Reserve (Lau Lau Bay and Lighthouse Reef). And not every MPA is the same. We have 2 different types right here on Saipan. MPAs can vary from being so “protected” that you are not even allowed to drive a boat through or swim in them (the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park has a few of these types), to an area that you are allowed to do just about anything in, except, for example, drill for oil. There are MPAs that protect everything in them and some that protect only one species. There are big MPAs (some bigger than the entire CNMI) and some very small MPAs (like our 1-mile long Lighthouse Reef Trochus Reserve).

But to keep it simple, MPAs are areas of the ocean where there are certain rules, regulations, or restrictions that apply. And to make it even more understandable, much of the scientific research that is being done on MPAs is done in the type that are called “no-take” MPAs, where people are generally allowed to be inside the MPAs, they are just not allowed to take anything out (fish, shells, crabs, etc.). The MPAs we have around Managaha Island, Forbidden Island, and Bird Island are all examples of no-take MPAs. Why do the scientists focus on these ones? Well, to put it simply, they are studying what effect people have on the oceans by keeping people from “taking” stuff out of an area and comparing that area to the areas around it where people can take stuff out.

The First International Marine Protected Areas Congress (IMPAC, from now on) was basically 800 people who deal with MPAs as researchers, as site managers, as social scientists, as politicians, as indigenous communities, or as users, getting together for 5 days straight from 8am to 6pm and talking about nothing but MPAs. Presentations and discussions were centered around five general themes: Sustainability (ensuring long-term success of MPAs), Developing Networks of MPAs (vs. single sites), Ecosystem Processes (the science mumbo-jumbo), Effective Management (are established sites working?), and Shared Stewardship (it’s not just government’s job to protect the oceans!). Attendees were able to sit in one room and listen to 4 similar presentations on a single topic, or they could run around frantically trying to hear the best presentations on all the different topics. Interestingly, as the week wore on and weariness set in, people tended to stay in one room!

So, what lessons were learned at this worldwide conference? There were some interesting findings. One study from our Hawaiian neighbors compared no-take MPAs to MPAs that allow seasonal or rotational fishing and to fully open areas. Once all the data was collected and the numbers were crunched, it turns out that having seasonal or rotating closures was no different than allowing fishing all year long, while the fully closed areas showed great increased in fish size and numbers. One would think that rotating harvest of the sea would work like harvesting crops on land, but it turns out that much different ecological processes are controlling our coral reefs and how fast they can recover. On a similar topic, it was also noted at the conference that having MPAs is not the answer to all of the problems that affect our oceans. A combination of a well-designed network of MPAs, including no-take areas, with good fishery management techniques (such as gear restrictions, bag limits, and size limits) and good management of land based sources of pollution, like runoff, is the best solution for our oceans in the long term.

In another lesson from the conference, we know there are benefits from MPAs, but we are still continuing to learn what they are. One site, Merrit Island National Willdlife Refuge in Florida, has been protected as a no-entry area (for security reasons, as it lies adjacent to Cape Canaveral) for 43 years and we are still learning about the benefits and changes as they happen over time. It turns out that some parts of the marine ecosystem recover very quickly, while others can take decades or longer to recover. Much of the conference chatter centered around ecological connectivity, in other words, how are all the different creatures out there in the ocean connected? What types of habitats to they rely on? How does removing one type of creature effect the entire system? One speaker presented evidence that some large pelagic fishes, such as sharks, like to use sandy bottom areas as “highways” to get from one reef to the next. It has interesting implications, as we must begin to think about protecting seemingly deserted and “unimportant” sandy bottom areas if we want to maintain the the connections between areas.

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park is another great example of recent work that has been done on connectivity. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (or GBRMPA, pronounced, “Gra-berm-pa”) recently completed an MPA project on a scale that has never been seen before (but is likely to be repeated around the globe). The GBR Marine Park spans most of the coast of eastern Australia, and is home to our now world famous movie star “Nemo”. The park, to get an idea of the size of it, if superimposed onto the west coast of the US would cover an area stretching from the Mexico border to the Canadian border. This marine park is one, big MPA, but it is not closed to fishing. In fact, there is quite a bit of recreational fishing, commercial fishing, trawling, long lining, SCUBA diving, boating, snorkeling, and just about anything else you can think of going on inside the boundaries of this World Heritage Site. It’s a great example of what’s called a “multiple-use marine protected area”. Managers realized the importance of allowing the area to be utilized, but they still kept some of the best areas of the park protected in what they call “green zones,” which are no-take areas. There was a problem, however, when managers began to realize that although they had protected some special reefs, they had missed a lot of other important habitats and that they didn’t feel that the small area (less than 5 percent) that was protected was enough to ensure the long-term survival of the Great Barrier Reef. So they began what they called the “Representative Areas Program”, where they mapped out every single different habitat found in the park waters, from seagrass beds to different types of coral reefs to mangroves, to sandy bottoms (no, not that kind). They then took the habitat maps out to the general public (fishermen, divers, tour operators, etc.) and got them to mark areas the they wanted to see protected and areas that they wanted to see left open. After four years of hard work, over 30,000 comments, a couple of major revisions, and a complex computer program to do the number crunching, they ended up redesigning the entire marine park. The result, which was made into law in July 2004, was that 33 percent of the Marine Park was protected with no-take “green-zones”. In the long run, they believe that fishermen will actually benefit from the spillover of fish from the green zones. In fact, many (but certainly not all!) fishermen supported the park rezoning. It is common in cases like this (and in the case of our own net ban) that over time people begin to realize the benefits of well-designed protection and will eventually begin to support such measures.

In the end, many lessons were learned at this historic conference dedicated solely to the discussion of MPAs, the first of it’s kind. It takes skilled staff and scientists, political will and commitment, well-trained enforcement officers, and most of all, public support to have an effective system of marine protected areas. Once you have all that, the evidence is out there that they work, and that they work well. MPAs work for the people utilizing the resources today and for the people 100 years from now who will thanks us for preserving an important natural resource, a national treasure, an economic engine, and a way of life: our ocean environment. Perhaps we here in the CNMI will be able to learn from the stories shared at this important conference and, hopefully, will be able to tell our own success story at the next IMPAC scheduled for 2009. (GREG MORETTI)

Greg Moretti works at the Division of Fish and Wildlife and is the Marine Protected Areas Program Coordinator. He attended the IMPAC 1 conference along with Dr. Teny Topalian (DFW/NOAA) and three delegates from Guam.