Marine Protected Area Planning in a Changing Climate
This chapter examines the role of marine protected area networks in conserving coral reefs under climate change. It reviews environmental factors linked to bleaching resistance and outlines strategies for spreading risk, protecting resilient reefs, enhancing connectivity, and improving management to build ecological resilience.
Subject Tags
- Reefs
- Marine protected areas
- Climate resilience
Summary
The establishment of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) has become an important part of society's approach to conserving coral reefs. Protected area managers now must attempt to take account of climate change in the design and implementation of MPAs. A network of MPAs provides a logical way to distribute their benefits to the wider reef system of which they are part, and to minimize the risk that spatially unpredictable and unmanageable insults of any type may decimate all protected areas. This chapter reviews the types of environmental factors and settings that might be considered in the network design process. We focus mainly on environmental factors that appear to confer ecological resilience to bleaching, and also briefly touch on physiological resistance conferred to corals by some strains of zooxanthellae. Finally, our chapter provides a model outlining these four actions that MPA managers may take to build resilience into coral reef conservation programs: 1) spread risk by protecting multiple examples of a full range of reef types; 2) identify and protect coral communities that demonstrate bleaching resistance and may thus increased contribute genetically based bleaching resistance to recovering areas; 3) incorporate connectivity into MPA and network design; and 4) increase effectiveness and flexibility of reef management strategies.
Citation
Salm, R. V., Done, T., & McLeod, E. (2006). Marine protected area planning in a changing climate. Coral reefs and climate change: Science and management, 61, 207-221.
TNC Authors
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Elizabeth Mcleod
Global Director, Oceans. Global Oceans
The Nature Conservancy
Email: emcleod@tnc.org -
Rodney V. Salm
The Nature Conservancy