Taking climate-smart governance to the high seas.

Comprehensive spatial planning in international waters is key to achieving ocean sustainability.

The MPA Guide: A framework to achieve global goals for the ocean.

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are conservation tools intended to protect biodiversity, promote healthy and resilient marine ecosystems, and provide societal benefits. Despite codification of MPAs in international agreements, MPA effectiveness is currently undermined by confusion about the many MPA types and consequent wildly differing outcomes. We present a clarifying science-driven framework­The MPA Guide­to aid design and evaluation. The guide categorizes MPAs by stage of establishment and level of protection, specifies the resulting direct and indirect outcomes for biodiversity and human well-being, and describes the key conditions necessary for positive outcomes. Use of this MPA Guide by scientists, managers, policy-makers, and communities can improve effective design, implementation, assessment, and tracking of existing and future MPAs to achieve conservation goals by using scientifically grounded practices.

Addressing transboundary conservation challenges through marine spatial prioritization.

The Adriatic and Ionian Region is an important area for both strategic maritime development and biodiversity conservation in the European Union (EU). However, given that both EU and non-EU countries border the sea, multiple legal and regulatory frameworks operate at different scales, which can hinder the coordinated long-term sustainable development of the region. Transboundary marine spatial planning can help overcome these challenges by building consensus on planning objectives and making the trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and its influence on economically important sectors more explicit. We address this challenge by developing and testing 4 spatial prioritization strategies with the decision-support tool Marxan, which meets targets for biodiversity conservation while minimizing impacts to users. We evaluated these strategies in terms of how priority areas shift under different scales of target setting (e.g., regional vs. country level). We also examined the trade-off between cost-efficiency and how equally solutions represent countries and maritime industries (n = 14) operating in the region with the protection-equality metric. We found negligible differences in where priority conservation areas were located when we set targets for biodiversity at the regional versus country scale. Conversely, the prospective impacts on industries, when considered as costs to be minimized, were highly divergent across scenarios and biased the placement of protection toward industries located in isolation or where there were few other industries. We recommend underpinning future marine spatial planning efforts in the region through identification of areas of national significance, transboundary areas requiring cooperation between countries, and areas where impacts on maritime industries require careful consideration of the trade-off between biodiversity conservation and socioeconomic objectives.

Transforming management of tropical coastal seas to cope with challenges of the 21st century.

Over 1.3 billion people live on tropical coasts, primarily in developing countries. Many depend on adjacent coastal seas for food, and livelihoods. We show how trends in demography and in several local and global anthropogenic stressors are progressively degrading capacity of coastal waters to sustain these people. Far more effective approaches to environmental management are needed if the loss in provision of ecosystem goods and services is to be stemmed. We propose expanded use of marine spatial planning as a framework for more effective, pragmatic management based on ocean zones to accommodate conflicting uses. This would force the holistic, regional-scale reconciliation of food security, livelihoods, and conservation that is needed. Transforming how countries manage coastal resources will require major change in policy and politics, implemented with sufficient flexibility to accommodate societal variations. Achieving this change is a major challenge - one that affects the lives of one fifth of humanity.

Common property systems, migration, and coastal ecosystems.

Common property systems are a critical institution mediating the relationship between population change and environmental outcomes, especially in coastal and marine ecosystems. Evidence from El Salvador; Goa, India; and the Solomon Islands demonstrates how the social structures and institutions stemming from patterns of human migration variably influence environmental out-comes through their effects on common property resource institutions. In each of the case studies, the demographic phenomenon is not population growth or a change in numbers, but an underlying process that affects population size and growth rates: i.e. migration and associated social relations that result from or cause more migration. The following 3 cases studies provide the respective historical and cultural context to show that there is a nonlinear link between population and environment, which when explored reveals the importance of understanding how individuals and communities are embedded in sets of social relations that must be considered when evaluating environmental policies or when determining the causes of environmental degradation.