Australia’s no-take marine protected areas: Appropriate conservation or inappropriate management of fishing?

R. Kearney, C.D. Buxton and G. Farebrother

Marine Policy, 2012, vol. 36, issue 5, 1064-1071

Abstract: The absence of properly identified mechanisms to adequately protect the marine environment remains a major shortcoming in Australia’s commitment to biodiversity conservation. The current commitment to a National Representative System of Marine Protected Areas (NRSMPA) falls far short of providing adequate protection against the suite of existing and potential threats even though areas are designated as being ‘protected’. In this paper it is argued that the actions taken under the NRSMPA are disproportionately concentrated on regulating fishing, including the closing of areas in so-called sanctuary zones to all types of fishing. In the absence of clearly identified threats from most forms of fishing and without assessment of how best to manage those few fishing threats that have been identified, such actions are inefficient and mostly inappropriate. Moreover, they do not provide adequate protection against the full suite of threats to marine environments. Adequate measures for the proper conservation of these areas and/or the protection of marine biodiversity more generally are not being provided and in most cases threats are not even adequately described and evaluated.

Keywords: Marine conservation; Fishery management; Marine protected areas (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308597X12000413
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:marpol:v:36:y:2012:i:5:p:1064-1071

DOI: 10.1016/j.marpol.2012.02.024

Access Statistics for this article

Marine Policy is currently edited by Eddie Brown

More articles in Marine Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().