Protecting the world’s oceans from the growing damage caused by human activities may be cheaper and take up less space than previously thought, according to an investigation.
Professor Anthony Richardson, from the University of Queensland, collaborated on the study, which seeks to halt the rapid decline of marine biodiversity resulting from the expansion of industrial activities in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ).
“This ‘blue acceleration,’ as we call it, has witnessed a greater diversity of stakeholders in ABNJ, such as the high seas and international seabeds beyond the exclusive economic zones,” said Professor Richardson.
“This has led to a question in which current marine protection methods analyze each sector separately – such as fishing, shipping and the deep-sea mining industries – all of them with their own set of impacts on species, communities and ecosystems,” he added.
Three specific sectoral plans: fishing, shipping and deep-sea mining
Consequently, the researchers evaluated the design of different networks of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) across the Indian Ocean that aim at biodiversity-rich areas with minimal impact on lucrative human activity.
“Essentially, we evaluated the potential trade-off solutions associated with the inclusion of multiple stakeholders in an intersectoral network of protected areas, as opposed to a specific sectoral network, for ABNJ in the Indian Ocean,” Richardson stated.
The professor explained that, “first, we created three specific sectoral plans – involving fishing, shipping and mining separately – to identify the best locations for strict, no-take MPAs.”
He continued, “Then we created an intersectoral no-exploitation plan that minimizes the opportunity cost for all stakeholders simultaneously, analyzing the overall framework with each stakeholder in mind.”
“After generating these plans, we compared the three specific sectoral solutions, as well as their sum, with the intersectoral solution,” he added.
The lead researcher at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Léa Fourchault, stated that the intersectoral approach achieved the same conservation objectives with much lower incremental costs for each stakeholder than if all sector-specific plans were implemented without coordination.
“For example, the fishing sector may lose 20% of its potential revenues under the intersectoral plan, but would lose 54% if all three sector-specific plans were implemented simultaneously without coordination,” Fourchault explained.
“This was consistent for the shipping and mining sectors as well, with the shipping sector losing two percent of its potential revenue instead of 26 percent, and the mining sector losing one percent instead of around eight percent,” she added.
“Our results also show that we can reduce the size of MPAs from 25% of the spatial plan to 8%, while achieving the same conservation objectives,” she further stated, explaining that “this would allow achieving 30 percent coverage for important biodiversity features, including key life-cycle areas of marine megafauna, biologically and ecologically important areas and areas important for deep-sea ecosystems, such as seamounts, vents and plateaus.”
The researchers believe that the intersectoral approach could be a first step toward implementing the conservation objectives of the United Nations High Seas Treaty, recently signed.
“The code for our study is available online and can be used by scientists, conservationists and policymakers – and it can be applied to any ocean on Earth,” Fourchault said.
“Ultimately, the aim is not only to minimize conflicts between conservationists and the various industries, but also to ensure that marine life is protected against the cumulative negative impacts of the three industries simultaneously,” she concluded.
