MPA4Sustainability

Currently, there are more than 17,000 marine protected areas (MPAs) around the world covering close to 9% of the oceans. Yet, only 23% of them have a clear management plan and only about 1% of them have had management effectiveness evaluations. Such management plans are crucial for the success of MPAs, but the development and implementation of those plans often meet financial and infrastructure obstacles. Even if guidelines exist, they do not systematically explain how to measure, monitor, and manage trade-offs between biodiversity targets and socio-economic impacts of MPAs. Particularly, there are currently no guidelines for developing adaptive plans to ensure the transformative change that MPAs are to bring for ecosystem restoration and conservation, biodiversity improvement, and to meet UN SDG targets. This is the key gap mpa4sustainability will address by conceptualising MPAs as interventions on complex socio-ecological systems and trying to appraise how they affect their journeys towards sustainability.