From Marxan to management: ocean zoning with stakeholders for Tun Mustapha Park in Sabah, Malaysia

Abstract

Tun Mustapha Park, in Sabah, Malaysia, was gazetted in May 2016 and is the first multiple-use park in Malaysia where conservation, sustainable resource use and development co-occur within one management framework. We applied a systematic conservation planning tool, Marxan with Zones, and stakeholder consultation to design and revise the draft zoning plan. This process was facilitated by Sabah Parks, a government agency, and WWF-Malaysia, under the guidance of the Tun Mustapha Park steering committee and with support from the University of Queensland. Four conservation and fishing zones, including no-take areas, were developed, each with representation and replication targets for key marine habitats, and a range of socio-economic and community objectives. Here we report on how decision-support tools informed the reserve design process in three planning stages: prioritization, government review, and community consultation. Using marine habitat and species representation as a reporting metric, we describe how the zoning plan changed at each stage of the design process. We found that the changes made to the zoning plan by the government and stakeholders resulted in plans that compromised the achievement of conservation targets because no-take areas were moved away from villages and the coastline, where unique habitats are located. The design process highlights a number of lessons learned for future conservation zoning, which we believe will be useful as many other places embark on similar zoning processes on land and in the sea.

Strengthening the synergies among global biodiversity targets to reconcile conservation and socio‐economic demands

“…Such displacement would substantially decrease opportunity costs and alleviate conservation conflicts with all resource users, but especially with one of the most widespread and important extractive activities worldwide: fishing (Kroodsma et al, ). The incorporation of socio‐economic information would thus help to achieve a balance between development and conservation goals, as evidenced by studies in other countries with broad dependency on sea resources (Jumin et al, ; Li et al, ; Mazor et al, ). However, explicitly including the broad range of qualitative elements of the Aichi Target 11 (Rees, Foster, Langmead, Pittman, & Johnson, ) could create additional trade‐offs, not addressed here, among planning objectives.…”

“…Such displacement would substantially decrease opportunity costs and alleviate conservation conflicts with all resource users, but especially with one of the most widespread and important extractive activities worldwide: fishing (Kroodsma et al, 2018). The incorporation of socio-economic information would thus help to achieve a balance between development and conservation goals, as evidenced by studies in other countries with broad dependency on sea resources (Jumin et al, 2017;Li et al, 2019;Mazor et al, 2014 In Brazil, as in many countries around the world (Klein et al, 2008;Mazor et al, 2014), large and small-scale fisheries are the major constraints for protecting high-priority areas. Given the growing geographical expansion of marine fisheries (Swartz, Sala, Tracey, Watson, & Pauly, 2010), the barriers imposed by the fishing sector to marine protection should increase in the future.…”

“…Given that marine conservation efforts happen in a scenario shared by multiple societal and governmental sectors (including commercial fishing, mining, hydrocarbon industry, tourism, maritime transport, etc. ), both biological and socio-economic goals should be integrated from the onset of conservation efforts (Halpern et al, 2013;Jumin et al, 2017;Knight, Cowling, Boshoff, Wilson, & Pierce, 2011). This could avoid polarization among different and often competing stakeholders and facilitate the implementation of conservation actions (Ban & Klein, 2009;Mazor, Giakoumi, Kark, & Possingham, 2014;Naidoo et al, 2006).…”

Identifying the strengths and weaknesses of conservation planning at different scales: the Coral Triangle as a case study

“…A number of factors contributed to this situation. Malaysia and Timor Leste each had only one instance of systematic conservation planning at the time of our analysis (Edyvane et al 2012, Jumin et al 2018). In the Philippines, where there is upward of 1200 marine protected areas (Horigue et al 2012), only one conservation plan could be identified.…”

The use, and usefulness, of spatial conservation prioritizations

“…Prioritization is often contained within a larger systematic conservation planning (SCP) process, which uses one or more operational models to design and translate prioritizations to on-the-ground conservation action (Groves & Game, 2015;Kukkala & Moilanen, 2013). Central among the recommendations made by these models and the supporting literature are the involvement of stakeholders in the development process, identification, and collaboration with end users early in the process and the delivery of final products in a user-useful format, such as by producing supporting documents (Jumin et al, 2017;Knight, Cowling, Boshoff, Wilson, & Pierce, 2011;Pierce et al, 2005;Theobald et al, 2000). These approaches help deliver conservation outcomes through improving stakeholder buy-in, increasing trust, and improving communication (Bottrill, Mills, Pressey, Game, & Groves, 2012;Knight et al, 2006;Pierce et al, 2005).…”