Market Systems for Marine Conservation: the role of
scuba diving taxes to achieve nature positive outcomes – the case of Ponta do
Ouro, Mozambique. How market-based approaches to
co-management of marine areas, such as dive eco-tourism initiatives, create
economic benefits for local communities while encouraging responsible tourism
practices and protecting marine ecosystems.
Numerous
studies and news articles point to the detrimental impact of tourism on
biodiversity, both terrestrial and marine (name a few). Few studies point to
the nature-positive impact of tourism, particularly non-mass and eco-friendly
tourism (name a few studies).
Background
– Mozambique/Ponta
- Both Tchumbe (Tanzania)
and/or Wakatobi or Misool (Indonesia)in Indonesia face challenges of
balancing marine resource use with conservation, particularly amidst
threats like overfishing and coral reef degradation. - Eco-tourism has emerged
as a potential tool for achieving both economic development and marine
conservation goals in these regions.
MPAs
– Importance of for Reef Fish/Coral Health
MPA
help protect coral/fish -important of
See
diving user fees paper Depont
Sustaining
MPAs have been challenging – Lack of Finance
Paper
Parks
Effectiveness
of MPAs etc.
Marine
Finance – driving in finance to enforce MPAs
Walsh
Thesis – marine finance
Blue
Bonds
Debt
for Nature Swaps
Payment
for Ecosystem Services
Market
mechanisms – sustainable tourism, dive tax, etc.
Economic
Benefits of Eco-Tourism:
- Several studies highlight
the economic benefits of eco-tourism in Ponta, including: - Revenue
generation: - Employment
creation: Ecotourism initiatives like community-based marine
protected areas create jobs for local communities in tourism
services, guiding, and conservation activities. - Livelihood
diversification: Eco-tourism offers alternative income sources for
communities traditionally reliant on extractive practices like
fishing, potentially reducing pressure on marine resources. - Worldwide, same studies
show benefits: Research by [A. A. Kusumawardhani et
al., 2020] shows that tourism contributed significantly to local
income in Misool, with homestay owners seeing a 58% increase in
revenue after engaging in ecotourism practices.
Scuba
Diving and Dive Tourism – benefits/impacts
The
role of SCUBA diver user fees as a source of sustainable funding for coral reef
marine Protected areas (Terk 2010)
Pereirra
Dissertation
Motta
2000 – Ponta
English,
S., Wilkinson, C. & Baker, V. (eds.). 1994. Survey Manual for Tropical
Marine
Resources.
368 p. Townsville, Australian Institute of Marine Science.
Rodrigues,
M.J., Motta, H., Pereira, M., Gonçalves, M., Carvalho, M. & Schleyer, M.
1999.
Monitoring Programme and 1999 report, MICOA-ORI- IIP, Maputo, 64 p.
Schleyer,
M., Obura, D., Motta, H. & Rodrigues, M.J. 1999. A Preliminary assessment
of
coral
bleaching in Mozambique. In: Lindén, O. & Sporrong, N. (eds.) Coral Reef
Degradation
in the Indian Ocean: status reports and project presentations 1999, CORDIO,
pp.
37-42.
Willingness
to Pay for Dive Taxes
Data
Tim
McClanahan, & Maxwell Azali. (2024). Western Indian Ocean
Coral Fish Biodiversity. Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity. doi:10.5063/F19885HT.
I.R.
Caldwell, T.R. McClanahan, R.M. Oddenyo, N.A. Graham, M. Beger, L. Vigliola,
S.A. Sandin, A.M. Friedlander, B. Randriamanantsoa, L. Wantiez, A.L. Green,
A.T. Humphries, M.J. Hardt, J.E. Caselle, D.A. Feary, R. Karkarey, C. Jadot,
A.S. Hoey, J.G. Eurich, S.K. Wilson, N. Crane, M. Tupper, S.C. Ferse, E. Maire,
D. Mouillot, J.E. Cinner, Protection efforts have resulted in ~10% of existing
fish biomass on coral reefs, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.
121
(42) e2308605121,
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2308605121
(2024).
I.R.
Caldwell, T.R. McClanahan, R.M. Oddenyo, N.A. Graham, M. Beger, L. Vigliola,
S.A. Sandin, A.M. Friedlander, B. Randriamanantsoa, L. Wantiez, A.L. Green,
A.T. Humphries, M.J. Hardt, J.E. Caselle, D.A. Feary, R. Karkarey, C. Jadot,
A.S. Hoey, J.G. Eurich, S.K. Wilson, N. Crane, M. Tupper, S.C. Ferse, E. Maire,
D. Mouillot, J.E. Cinner, Protection efforts have resulted in ~10% of existing
fish biomass on coral reefs, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.
121
(42) e2308605121,
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2308605121
(2024).
Abstract
The
amount of ocean protected from fishing and other human impacts has often been
used as a metric of conservation progress. However, protection efforts have
highly variable outcomes that depend on local conditions, which makes it
difficult to quantify what coral reef protection efforts to date have actually
achieved at a global scale. Here, we develop a predictive model of how local
conditions influence conservation outcomes on ~2,600 coral reef sites across 44
ecoregions, which we used to quantify how much more fish biomass there is on
coral reefs compared to a modeled scenario with no protection. Under the
assumptions of our model, our study reveals that without existing protection
efforts there would be ~10% less fish biomass on coral reefs. Thus, we estimate
that coral reef protection efforts have led to approximately 1 in every 10 kg
of existing fish biomass.
McClanahan,
T. R., Friedlander, A. M., Wickel, J., Graham, N. A. J., Bruggemann, J. H., Guillaume,
M. M. M., Chabanet, P., Porter, S., Schleyer, M. H., Azali, M. K., & Muthiga,
N. A. (2024). Testing for concordance between predicted species richness, past
prioritization, and marine protected area designations in the western Indian
Ocean. Conservation Biology, 38, e14256. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.14256
Abstract
Scientific advances in environmental data coverage and
machine learning algorithms have improved the ability to make large-scale
predictions where data are missing. These advances allowed us to develop a
spatially resolved proxy for predicting numbers of tropical nearshore marine
taxa. A diverse marine environmental spatial database was used to model numbers
of taxa from ∼1000
field sites, and the predictions were applied to all 7039 6.25-km2
reef cells in 9 ecoregions and 11 nations of the western Indian Ocean. Our
proxy for total numbers of taxa was based on the positive correlation (r2 = 0.24)
of numbers of taxa of hard corals and 5 highly diverse reef fish families. Environmental relationships
indicated that the number of fish species was largely influenced by biomass,
nearness to people, governance, connectivity, and productivity and that coral
taxa were influenced mostly by physicochemical environmental variability.
At spatial delineations of province, ecoregion, nation, and strength of spatial
clustering, we compared areas of conservation priority based on our total
species proxy with those identified in 3 previous priority-setting reports and
with the protected area database. Our method identified 119 locations that fit
3 numbers of taxa (hard coral, fish, and their combination) and 4 spatial
delineations (nation, ecoregion, province, and reef clustering) criteria.
Previous publications on priority setting identified 91 priority locations of
which 6 were identified by all reports. We identified 12 locations that fit our
12 criteria and corresponded with 3 previously identified locations, 65 that
aligned with at least 1 past report, and 28 that were new locations. Only 34%
of the 208 marine protected areas in this province overlapped with identified
locations with high numbers of predicted taxa. Differences occurred because
past priorities were frequently based on unquantified perceptions of remoteness
and preselected priority taxa. Our environment–species proxy and modeling
approach can be considered among other important criteria for making
conservation decisions.