Fishing-focused marine conservation planning underestimates losses of other ecosystem benefits to local communities

Hamel, Mélanie A and Pressey, Robert L and Andréfouët, Serge and Hicks, Christina (2026) Fishing-focused marine conservation planning underestimates losses of other ecosystem benefits to local communities. Scientific Reports. ISSN 2045-2322

Abstract

Incorporating meaningful social and economic information into conservation planning is challenging but critical to minimizing impacts of conservation actions on livelihoods and increasing the likelihood of compliance with restrictions on resource use. The social impacts of conservation reserves are generally included in planning mostly through opportunity costs. For marine systems, these opportunity costs tend to be measured only for fishers. However, the services and associated benefits people gain from their marine environments go beyond food and income from fishing. People also benefit from recreation, aesthetic enjoyment, spiritual connections, medicine, and culture. We explored how conservation planning can be informed and optimized with data on how people value coral-reef ecosystem benefits. We identified and mapped important places, including for fishing, to households of the Riwo (Ziwo) community of the Madang Lagoon, Papua New Guinea, using interviews from heads of households (n = 52). Then, we incorporated data on the multiple benefits of the Madang Lagoon into spatial prioritization with novel cost functions. We found that different places in the Madang Lagoon were important for different reasons, and that designing reserves only to minimise forgone fishing can have incidental impacts on other benefits. We also found that incorporating information on all benefits was the most effective way to minimize the loss of the full suite of benefits, should their access be limited by reserves. We demonstrated how planners can develop approaches that consider all the various costs of conservation that matter to local people.