Well-being outcomes of marine protected areas

Natalie C. Ban (), Georgina Grace Gurney, Nadine A. Marshall, Charlotte K. Whitney, Morena Mills, Stefan Gelcich, Nathan J. Bennett, Mairi C. Meehan, Caroline Butler, Stephen Ban, Tanya C. Tran, Michael E. Cox and Sara Jo Breslow
Additional contact information
Natalie C. Ban: University of Victoria
Georgina Grace Gurney: James Cook University
Nadine A. Marshall: CSIRO Land and Water
Charlotte K. Whitney: University of Victoria
Morena Mills: Imperial College London
Stefan Gelcich: Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
Nathan J. Bennett: University of British Columbia
Mairi C. Meehan: Memorial University of Newfoundland
Caroline Butler: Gitxaala Nation Fisheries Program
Stephen Ban: Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy
Tanya C. Tran: University of Victoria
Michael E. Cox: Dartmouth College
Sara Jo Breslow: University of Washington

Nature Sustainability, 2019, vol. 2, issue 6, 524-532

Abstract: Abstract Marine protected areas are advocated as a key strategy for simultaneously protecting marine biodiversity and supporting coastal livelihoods, but their implementation can be challenging for numerous reasons, including perceived negative effects on human well-being. We synthesized research from 118 peer-reviewed articles that analyse outcomes related to marine protected areas on people, and found that half of documented well-being outcomes were positive and about one-third were negative. No-take, well-enforced and old marine protected areas had positive human well-being outcomes, which aligns with most findings from ecological studies. Marine protected areas with single zones had more positive effects on human well-being than areas with multiple zones. Most studies focused on economic and governance aspects of well-being, leaving social, health and cultural domains understudied. Well-being outcomes arose from direct effects of marine protected area governance processes or management actions and from indirect effects mediated by changes in the ecosystem. Our findings illustrate that both human well-being and biodiversity conservation can be improved through marine protected areas, yet negative impacts commonly co-occur with benefits.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0306-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:nat:natsus:v:2:y:2019:i:6:d:10.1038_s41893-019-0306-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/natsustain/

DOI: 10.1038/s41893-019-0306-2

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Sustainability is currently edited by Monica Contestabile

More articles in Nature Sustainability from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().