Browsing by Subject "Marine protected areas"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Marine protected area governance: Prospects for co-management in the European Mediterranean
    (PAGEpress, 2013-11-20) Hogg, Katie; Noguera-Méndez, Pedro; Giménez-Casalduero, María; Semitiel-García, María; Economía Aplicada
    Marine protected areas (MPAs) raise serious challenges in terms of their governance. By applying a participatory approach co-management can help in overcoming many of the deficiencies of top-down management processes. Yet, despite benefits of comanagement, it is still found to be the exception in the Mediterranean. This paper provides a review of co-management and the prospects for decentralisation in the European Mediterranean. The role of social capital (SC) in co-management is discussed and a framework for SC and participation to attain effective co-management is proposed.
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    Perceptions of threats facing Cabo de Palos - Islas Hormigas MPA and potential solutions
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2017-12-29) Hogg, Katie; Noguera-Méndez, Pedro; Gray, Tim; Young, Sarah; Semitiel-García, María; Economía Aplicada
    Many marine protected areas (MPAs) face a multitude of threats to the ecosystems that they have been established to conserve. This study is based on 111 interviews conducted in 2013–2014 designed to discover the perceptions of stakeholders about the threats, the causes of the threats, and their responses to the threats, to a well-established MPA – Cabo de Palos - Islas Hormigas (CPH-MPA). This MPA was created to safeguard fisheries and the associated artisanal fishers, but over time it has become a tourism “hotspot.” Resilience theory, which incorporates ecological resilience, social resilience, and individual resilience, helps us to analyze stakeholders' responses to threats by categorizing them into passive, adaptive, and transformative responses. We found respondents identified four main threats – over-fishing, excessive scuba diving, pollution, and invasive species; attributed the threats to three main causes – ineffective management, poor environmental stewardship, and climate change; and expressed three kinds of responses – do nothing, adapt, or transform – with a preference for adaptation and (especially) transformation. The lesson of this study is that it shows how, unless drastic action is taken to curb recreational diving activities, the CPH-MPA is in danger of changing from a fishing reserve to a largely unregulated leisure diving venue, which is unlikely to fulfill the requirements of resilience; ecological, social, or individual.
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    Reviewing the ecosystem services, societal goods, and benefits of marine protected areas
    (Frontiers Media, 2021-06-01) Marcos Diego, María Concepción; Díaz, David; Fietz, Katharina; Forcada, Aitor; Ford, Amanda; García Charton, José Antonio; Goñi, Raquel; Lenfant, Philippe; Mallol, Sandra; Mouillot, David; Pérez Marcos, María; Puebla, Oscar; Manel, Stephanie; Pérez Ruzafa, Ángel; Ecología e Hidrología
    Marine protected areas (MPAs) are globally important environmental management tools that provide protection from the effects of human exploitation and activities, supporting the conservation of marine biological diversity, habitats, ecosystems and the processes they host, as well as resources in a broad sense. Consequently, they are also expected to manage and enhance marine ecosystem services and material, non-material, consumptive and non-consumptive goods, and benefits for humans. There is however certain confusion on what constitutes an ecosystem service, and it is not always easy to distinguish between them and societal benefits. The main nuance is that an ecosystem service is the aptitude an ecosystem has or develops naturally or as consequence of a management action, and that manifests through its own properties (productivity, diversity, stability, quality of its key parameters, etc.), while a societal benefit is the economic or other profitability (emotional, educational, scientific, etc.) that humans obtain from said service or quality. In this work, 268 publications, together with our own experiences in the different investigations carried out in the MPAs that are part of the BiodivERsA3-2015-21 RESERVEBENEFIT European project, have been selected, reviewed and discussed to analyze the knowledge status of the expected ecosystem services of MPAs and the societal benefits derived from them, sometimes providing information on their evidence, when they exist. We define and classify the effects of protection, ecosystem services and societal benefits and elaborate a conceptual model of the cause-effect relationships between them.