Optimal Siting, Sizing, and Enforcement of Marine Protected Areas
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Optimal Siting, Sizing, and Enforcement of Marine Protected Areas H. J. Albers1 · L. Preonas2 · T. Capitán3 · E. J. Z. Robinson4 · R. Madrigal‑Ballestero5 Accepted: 9 July 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
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. Keywords Additionality · Bio-economic model · Enforcement · Leakage · Nash equilibrium · No-take reserves · Park effectiveness · Reserve site selection · Spatial prioritization · Systematic conservation planning · Marine spatial planning
1 Introduction Many countries are expanding their protected area (PA) networks, terrestrial and marine, to achieve both ecological goals, which often align with international conservation agreements (Pereira et al. 2013), and economic goals (Gaines et al. 2010; Jentoft et al. 2011), which often prioritize sustainable resource management for the benefit of nearby resource-dependent * H. J. Albers [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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communities (Cabral et al. 2019; Carr et al. 2019). However, for any of these goals, economic efficiency requires that PA siting and management decisions anticipate and consider the response of potential resource extractors, especially in settings of limited enforcement budgets (Cabral et al. 2017). Empirical economic analyses of terrestrial park effectiveness often rely on von Thunen-inspired models to predict the level of deforestation that would occur if a location was not in a PA, and then calculate the level of “avoided deforestation” create
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