Title
Can Management Actions Within the Fiji Locally Managed Marine Area Network Serve to Meet Fiji's National Goal to Protect 30% of Inshore Marine Areas by 2020?
Author(s)
Mills, Morena; Jupiter, Stacy; Adams, Vanessa; Ban, Natalie; Pressey, Bob
Published
2011
Abstract
In 2005 at the Barbados Plan of Action in Mauritius, the Fiji Government made a commitment to effectively manage and finance at least 30% of Fiji's inshore marine areas by 2020. Given that much of the planning for inshore marine management is undertaken by partners of the Fiji Locally Managed Marine Area (FLMMA) network, this study was undertaken to evaluate whether the expansion through the FLMMA network could achieve national conservation objectives by 2020. The work was completed as part of a prioritized action for quarter 3 of 2011 under Fiji's National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP) Implementation Plan 2010‐2014 thematic section for Inshore Fisheries. We developed a model simulating opportunistic expansion of the FLMMA network to 2020 under business as usual conditions using data collected from key informant interviews to identify factors driving establishment of fisheries closures in Fiji, data on the existing distribution of closures, FLMMA documents and maximum entropy modelling. We additionally compared this model to results obtained through systematic conservation planning techniques, which by definition are designed to optimize the cost‐effectiveness of the management actions. We found that under the opportunistic scenario, where conditions were designed to reflect an optimistic continuation of the current conditions, the FLMMA network will achieve a good portion of the national objectives, but will fall considerably short of the 2020 objectives. The systematic planning scenario achieved a much higher proportion of objectives, which suggests that systematic assessments could be useful to coordinate the FLMMA approach to help guide development of the marine protected area network in Fiji.
Full Citation
Mills, M., S. Jupiter, V. Adams, N. Ban, and B. Pressey (2011). Can Management Actions Within the Fiji Locally Managed Marine Area Network Serve to Meet Fiji's National Goal to Protect 30% of Inshore Marine Areas by 2020? Suva, Fiji: Wildlife Conservation Society, Fiji and ARC Centre for Excellence in Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, 1-16.

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