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HOW MARINE PROTECTED AREAS AFFECT LOCAL PEOPLE IS LESS CLEAR
Proponents argue that MPAs can have a slew of positive effects on fishing and coastal communities, including improved livelihoods from fisheries, political empowerment and new governance and job opportunities. Critics counter that MPAs restrict local communities’ access to their ancestral fishing grounds, make them poorer and often increase conflict between them and people involved in park management or tourism. But much of the research that exists on this consists of case reports that depend on interviews with local people.
“Such studies aren’t experimental and their results are subjective, but they are important because it matters whether the people think the marine protected areas have been effective or not,” said Natalie Ban, a marine biologist at the University of Victoria, Canada. However, these studies don’t tell us much about whether the establishment of MPAs, or some other sociopolitical factor, is really what’s driving these perceptions.
In a 2014 case report Mongabay looked at, for example, researchers interviewing communities near four Thai MPAs found that some people perceived a decline in their livelihood from fishing and collecting shells. Others said they hadn’t seen much change, mainly because either the authorities allowed small-scale fishing inside the protected areas or did not enforce the regulations. Another case report found that communities around an MPA in Zanzibar, Tanzania, were generally unhappy with how the park was being managed. Benefits from tourism and other jobs related to the protected area were inequitably distributed, and the communities felt marginalised.
A few studies have found some positive effects, too. A 2010 meta-analysis that combined data from 21 studies reported that some fishing communities perceived an increase in food security after the establishment of MPAs. Similarly, a 2013 case report found that local communities generally perceived an improvement in economic and environmental benefits from a protected area in the UK.
The cases Mongabay reviewed did not return any rigorously designed studies comparing villages around MPAs with similar villages around unprotected waters.
Gill agreed that only a handful of such rigorous studies exist, and pointed to one published in 2014 that looked at the social impacts of MPAs in Sulawesi, Indonesia. The researchers behind that study found divergent effects: Between 1997 and 2002, the protected areas appeared to increase livelihood options for people living near them compared to those living near unprotected waters, for instance. But the people living around the protected areas also rated their household well-being as lower than those in the control villages. These impacts changed after 2002 when the agencies managing the protected areas withdrew their support, the study found.
More such rigorous studies can tell us how the impacts of protected areas vary over time and across different communities, experts say, which can then potentially help managers design better marine protected areas. “If we continue to use marine protected areas, we better be sure to do it in ways that are equitable and not severely affecting the poor,” Gill said.