Optimal Siting, Sizing, and Enforcement of Marine Protected Areas

Abstract

The design of protected areas, whether marine or terrestrial, rarely considers how people respond to the imposition of no-take sites with complete or incomplete enforcement. Consequently, these protected areas may fail to achieve their intended goal. We present and solve a spatial bio-economic model in which a manager chooses the optimal location, size, and enforcement level of a marine protected area (MPA). This manager acts as a Stackelberg leader, and her choices consider villagers' best response to the MPA in a spatial Nash equilibrium of fishing site and effort decisions. Relevant to lower income country settings but general to other settings, we incorporate limited enforcement budgets, distance costs of traveling to fishing sites, and labor allocation to onshore wage opportunities. The optimal MPA varies markedly across alternative manager goals and budget sizes, but always induce changes in villagers' decisions as a function of distance, dispersal, and wage. We consider MPA managers with ecological conservation goals and with economic goals, and identify the shortcomings of several common manager decision rules, including those focused on: (1) fishery outcomes rather than broader economic goals, (2) fish stocks at MPA sites rather than across the full marinescape, (3) absolute levels rather than additional values, and (4) costless enforcement. Our results demonstrate that such naïve or overly narrow decision rules can lead to inefficient MPA designs that miss economic and conservation opportunities.

Economics of Marine Protected Areas: Assessing the Literature for Marine Protected Area Network Expansions

“…Many economic analyses view MPAs as fishery management tools and emphasize MPA impact on fish harvests and revenues as an economic objective, while also considering fish stocks as a conservation goal (Albers et al 2020a, Cornejo-Donoso et al 2017, Sanchirico & Wilen 2001, Smith & Wilen 2003. Reithe et al (2014) examine the impact of MPAs on producer and consumer surplus in a rare welfare analysis.…”

Investigating the role of spatial spillovers as determinants of land conversion in urbanizing Canada

“…The early focus of the literature is on identifying locations with the highest ecological value. More recent literature emphasizes the importance of multi-dimensional criteria related to public acceptance and people's responses (Brown et al ., 2019; Albers et al ., 2020). The optimal conservation design and the collective efforts can explain part of the spatial spillovers that researchers observe from real data.…”

“…Our work also provides useful information for resource governance (such as government cooperation at different levels) to deal with spillovers. The idea of incorporating different levels of spatial spillovers into modeling can also add value to the optimal conservation design (e.g., Albers et al ., 2020) with broader applications.…”

Anticipating anthropogenic threats in acquiring new protected areas

“…However, these terrestrial efforts do not include the choice to proactively select sites to protect based on expected postreserve threats and management considerations. In contrast, ex ante planning for postimplementation threats to reserves has been better explored in the marine context, albeit based on context‐specific assumptions and planning tools (e.g., Albers et al., 2020; Gill et al., 2017; Kuempel et al., 2018).…”