A growing number of nations aim to design coastal plans to reduce conflicts in space and safeguard ecosystems that provide important benefits to people and economies. Critics of coastal and ocean planning point to a complicated process with many actors, objectives, and uncertain outcomes. This paper explores one such decision-making process in Belize, which combines ecosystem service modeling, stakeholder participation, and spatial planning to design the country's first integrated coastal zone management plan, officially approved by the government in August 2016. We assessed risk to three coastal-marine habitats posed by eight human uses and quantified current and future delivery of three ecosystem services: protection from storms, catch and revenue from lobster fishing, and tourism expenditures to identify a preferred zoning scheme. We found that a highly adaptive team of planners, scientists, and analysts can overcome common planning obstacles, including a dearth of data describing the health of the coastal zone and the many uses it supports, complicated legal and political landscapes, and limited in-country technical capacity. Our work in Belize serves as an example for how to use science about the ways in which nature benefits people to effectively and transparently inform coastal and ocean planning decisions around the world.

Disease, storms, ocean warming, and pollution have caused the mass mortality of reef-building corals across the Caribbean over the last four decades. Subsequently, stony corals have been replaced by macroalgae, bacterial mats, and invertebrates including soft corals and sponges, causing changes to the functioning of Caribbean reef ecosystems. Here we describe changes in the absolute cover of benthic reef taxa, including corals, gorgonians, sponges, and algae, at 15 fore-reef sites (12–15m depth) across the Belizean Barrier Reef (BBR) from 1997 to 2016. We also tested whether Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), in which fishing was prohibited but likely still occurred, mitigated these changes. Additionally, we determined whether ocean-temperature anomalies (measured via satellite) or local human impacts (estimated using the Human Influence Index, HII) were related to changes in benthic community structure. We observed a reduction in the cover of reef-building corals, including the long-lived, massive corals Orbicella spp. (from 13 to 2%), and an increase in fleshy and corticated macroalgae across most sites. These and other changes to the benthic communities were unaffected by local protection. The covers of hard-coral taxa, including Acropora spp., Montastraea cavernosa, Orbicella spp., and Porites spp., were negatively related to the frequency of ocean-temperature anomalies. Only gorgonian cover was related, negatively, to our metric of the magnitude of local impacts (HII). Our results suggest that benthic communities along the BBR have experienced disturbances that are beyond the capacity of the current management structure to mitigate. We recommend that managers devote greater resources and capacity to enforcing and expanding existing marine protected areas and to mitigating local stressors, and most importantly, that government, industry, and the public act immediately to reduce global carbon emissions.

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Disease, ocean warming, and pollution have caused catastrophic declines in the cover of living coral on reefs across the Caribbean. Subsequently, reef-building corals have been replaced by invertebrates and macroalgae, leading to changes in ecological functioning. We describe changes in benthic community composition and cover at 15 sites across the Belizean Barrier Reef (BBR) following numerous major disturbances—bleaching, storms, and disease outbreaks—over the 20-year period 1997–2016. We tested the role of potential drivers of change on coral reefs, including local human impacts and ocean temperature. From 1997 to 2016, mean coral cover significantly declined from 26.3% to 10.7%, while macroalgal cover significantly increased from 12.9% to 39.7%. We documented a significant decline over time of the reef-building corals Orbicella spp. and described a major shift in benthic composition between early sampling years (1997–2005) and later years (2009¬–2016). The covers of hard-coral taxa, including Acropora spp., M. cavernosa, Orbicella spp., and Porites spp., were negatively related to marine heatwave frequency. Only gorgonian cover was related, negatively, to our metric of the magnitude of local impacts (the Human Influence Index). Changes in benthic composition and cover were not associated with local protection or fishing. This result is concordant with studies throughout the Caribbean that have documented living coral decline and shifts in reef-community composition following disturbances, regardless of local fisheries restrictions. Our results suggest that benthic communities along the BBR have experienced disturbances that are beyond the capacity of the current management structure to mitigate. We recommend that managers devote greater resources and capacity to enforce and expand existing marine protected areas and that government, industry, and the public act to reduce global carbon emissions.

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