This article is in part a response to the research study published a year ago.
The Ecologist: Governing Marine Protected Areas: Lyme Bay
Horatio Morpurgo
The scientific case for Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) is now overwhelming. The bigger question is how can they be managed more effectively? HORATIO MORPURGO reports. When conservation and utilitarian aims cannot agree, there has to be an overarching authority, committed to long-term, wider-scale objectives, which is prepared to make a decision in a particular context and enforce it with legal sanctions.
Fisheries scientists have long challenged the ‘sloppy thinking’ behind Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). These are too often called for, they argue, ‘on the basis of close to zero evidence’, by people whose real concern is not to conserve marine habitats but to ‘instil a sense of moral panic’. Fisheries scientists sum up their own approach, by contrast, as ‘rational, evidence-based and phased’.
On a scale of one to ten, then, how close to ‘zero evidence’ is well over 5000 scientific papers on MPAs since 1980? Those who have read even a fraction of those 5000 scientific papers will find them analytical in content and stone-cold sober in tone. They are anything but ‘romantic’.