«MARINE PROTECTED NATURAL AREAS»

MARINE RESERVES — PRESSING PROBLEMS

The need to create marine protected areas (MPAs), their role in nature conservation and their influence on economic development: these are topics which in the last few years have moved from specialized editions and scholarly works to the pages of mainstream scientific journals. Articles on different aspects of MPA creation and functioning have begun to appear in such journals as the Marine Ecology Progressive Series, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and even Science. This shows that more attention is being paid to marine environment conservation issues as well as to serious problems associated with this form of nature conservation.

When speaking about marine reserves as a means of nature conservation, people usually use the epithet “new”. This is partly true, because creating new MPAs has only become a trend in the last 10 or 15 years. Their number now exceeds 3000, and is still growing. Meanwhile, the first marine protected areas appeared long before. In a previous edition of Nature Reserves and National Parks (No. 31, pp. 49-51), I wrote that marine parks first appeared in the middle of the 20^th century, and that one of the most developed systems of marine recreation zones had taken shape by the 1960s in Japan. But, in fact, marine reserves existed more than a hundred years earlier. In 1852 the first etablissements de peche, areas where fishing was restricted, were created in the French Mediterranean. These small marine areas functioned as reproduction grounds — fishing was not allowed there during certain periods.

Major interest in marine reserves and their creation around the world began in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a reaction to the development of tourism, particularly underwater tourism. Unsupervised visits by groups of divers to coral reefs began to cause visible damage to the reefs; high-speed motorboats and scooters destroyed fields of underwater plants; local traditional methods of fishing clashed with the methods of amateur fishermen on vacation. At the same time, the experience of the first marine parks has shown that well-managed diving can profit local communities.

Marine protected areas began to serve as conservation areas for fish; the reserves were set up to manage coastal fishing and resolve conflicts between different methods of marine resource use. Such conflicts are usually the result of contemporary industrial methods of fishing (trawling fishing, marine culture) in areas traditionally fished by the local population.

The first experiments in setting up marine reserves of different types were a success. Tourism yielded visible profits, and fishermen noticed that the take of fish near the reserves had considerably increased. Between 1985 and 1992, revenues from tourism increased by 57% in Indonesia, and by 35% in Singapore and Thailand. Four years after the establishment of the Apo Marine Reserve (the Philippines), 11 out of 12 fishermen interviewed said that their catch had increased; and in 1996, all the respondents said that their catch had at least doubled. In New Zealand the ban on trawling in the Shelburne Gulf was vigorously protested by fishermen. But two years later the fishermen noticed that their catches near the protected area had increased. Now most fishermen support the ban.

Meanwhile, the enthusiasm of the first publications dedicated to marine protected areas has given way to a more reserved and even critical attitude. Researchers have started to focus more on those problems that haven’t yet been solved rather than on the successes.

The Mediterranean Sea has become a model area for the study of different aspects of MPA functioning. By 2000, 33 reserves had been created in the northwestern Mediterranean alone by EU member-states. The area of MPAs ranges from 21.5 hectares (Medes Sea Park in Spain, Catalonia) to 220,000 hectares (Alonnisos National Park in Greece).

One of the most important roles of any protected natural area is in the social and economic life of the local community. Detailed social and economic research of marine reserves has revealed some serious problems associated with tourism development. In spite of very high revenues from tourism, only a fraction of those revenues go to people living within the protected area. The lower the level of economic and industrial development in the region, the greater the share of tourist revenues that goes to outsiders. Since most MPAs are located outside developed industrial regions, local people are often unwilling to participate in such highly technological businesses as providing diving services. In this case, diving clubs are set up and serviced mostly by outsiders. Tourist firms residing outside the protected area receive major revenues. Such discrepancies, when extreme, may lead to serious conflicts. Resolution or prevention of such conflicts requires a professional approach to reserve management. It is easy to predict a conflict of this type and to provide special training for local people so as to prevent it. This makes a park or reserve more expensive at the outset, but the investment quickly pays off.

Of those MPA problems that remain unsolved, some are purely biological. Their direct effect on biodiversity conservation and conservation of production resources must be evaluated.

Increases in catches and marketable species resources are not necessarily due to the creation of an MPA. Mathematical modeling has proven that properly organized fisheries in an “open” district may have the same effect. A similar analysis was done using data taken on location. Information on populations of 40 marketable and 17 non-marketable fish species in 7 reserves of the Mediterranean was applied to three spatial scales — hundreds of square meters, tens of square kilometers, and hundreds of square kilometers. The results showed that the effect of a reserve regime differs with respect to different species and sometimes has no effect at all.

The contribution of reserves to biodiversity conservation is not that simple to evaluate. Thus, after 5 years of conservation work off New Caledonia the populations of sea species in marine reserves have increased by 64% in comparison to other control areas. At the same time, there has been in numbers of species in the Red Sea, where MPAs have existed for some 15 years. Frequently, the results of reserve work within the population level are more evident. First of all, it excludes negative selection as to the size structure of marketable species.

In Banyus-Cerbere Nature Reserve (650 hectares, established in 1974) after 6 years of the ban on bow-type and harpoon fishing tools, the number of fish species inhabiting rocking reefs was twice as high as it was outside the reserve. As for marketable species, there was an increase in the share of larger species. As for species diversity and richness, the reserved area did not differ much from the surrounding waters. Eighteen years after the establishment of the reserve there was no difference found in marketable or non-marketable species abundance between the reserve and adjacent areas. The only effect of the reserve was in the greater ratio of large (30 — 40 cm) fishes of marketable species within the reserve’s borders.

In Scandola Nature Reserve (Corsica, 1,000 hectares, established in 1974) by the middle of 1990s the total biomass and fish density inhabiting the rocks was approximately three times higher than in similar biotopes outside the reserve’s borders.

Thus, the greater the number of MPAs and the longer they function, the better the results tend to be. Obviously, long-term reserve effects depend on area size, inner heterogeneity, geographic peculiarities and cultural traditions in the region. The first decades of the MPA system’s existence have revealed only some of the scientific problems requiring solution. This experience should be very useful in Russia, where we are only just beginning to create a system of MPAs.

V.O. Mokievsky,
Institute of Oceanology
Russian Academy of Sciences

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