A guide for planners and managers - IUCN

82 MARINE AND COASTAL
PROTECTED AREAS
4.1 The Selection Process
Selection of sites for conservation management is but one of many elements in the
process of building an integrated system of marine protected areas. Thus, many of
the essential steps of this system planning process, such as goal identification, site
survey and data collection, data analysis, and data synthesis and plan formulation,
apply to site selection as well as all other elements of the marine protected area
programme.
While selection of marine protected areas through a systematic MPA planning
exercise is preferable, in actuality MPA selection is most frequently determined by
opportunity (a strong show of public and/or government support) or crisis (a high
level of threat to a site that is considered important for any reason).
Selection of sites according to some well-laid plan that includes clearly understood
goals and objectives, and a list of focused, practical criteria to guide site selection is
preferable to selection by ad hoc means, such as by opportunity or crisis. Opportunities
and crises are likely to arise at intervals, but one needs to try to get ahead of them if
selection is to proceed along systematic and programmatic lines.
In the selection planning exercise, guidelines are usually defined to help fulfill
the overall goal of the planning exercise. These guidelines are applied to evaluate
candidate sites for selection, which should include samples of social, economic,
ecological, regional, and pragmatic criteria that are applied to evaluate candidate sites
for selection. In the latter case, popular pressure or urgency imposed by threat
promotes action that may raise the priority for protection of a particular site.
Initiatives for establishing protected areas can come from local governments
or communities outside of any objective selection criteria. Sites protected in this way
have high local significance, but often may contribute less to the national conservation
objectives. Nonetheless, because they enjoy strong local support and may require modest
amounts of personnel, time, and money to manage, they should be viewed as useful
contributions to conservation. These should be endorsed if not counted as substitutes
for larger more extensive sites that might contribute more significantly to national
objectives for biodiversity conservation and development.
A useful application of selection criteria is to evaluate and identify, among
inherited, traditional, and locally established protected areas, those that contribute
to national conservation objectives. In any event a national set of criteria for choosing
MPAs is recommended.
In this section we propose some basic principles and list criteria that may help
to guide selection of marine protected areas. The criteria and approach for their
application have evolved relatively little from their original sources as reported in the
first edition of this book in 1984 (see Salm & Price, 1996) and are similar to those
published more recently (e.g., Kelleher & Kenchington, 1992; Nordiska Ministerrådet,