A guide for planners and managers - IUCN

5.9 Categories of Marine and Coastal Protected Areas
PART I
Strategies and Tools
In its most recent treatment of protected area categories, IUCN (1994) identifies
over 140 different names for marine and terrestrial protected areas from around the
world. This variety of names underscores the need for and value of using names that
have local meaning: this is as it should be—names should conform to their national
or local relevance and to promote understanding and acceptance, rather than
conforming to some international scheme.
However, this variety of names makes it difficult to communicate and compare
protected areas on the basis of names alone, and creates the need for a standard
terminology that is designed to facilitate understanding, communication, comparison,
and assessment of global conservation achievement. While IUCN categories may be
of slight relevance to an MPA site manager in his daily work, they may be of interest
to national planners and academics.
While criteria help select protected areas, categories define their management
regimes. For example, management category Ia, Strict Nature Reserve, may be
appropriate for safeguarding critical habitats of fish or for coastal protection, while
category VI, Managed Resource Protected Area, permits most uses, as long as they
are sustainable (see below listing).
Conservation categories provide a means for clearly incorporating conservation
into development. Each category relates to one or several major goals of a country’s
development plan: nutrition, environment, health, education, housing, water supply,
science, technology, defense, national identity, and international obligations. Viewed
in this way, conservation categories become the basis for sustainable development.
The six IUCN protected area categories, their management objectives and
selection criteria as presented by Davey (1998) are defined below:
Definition:
Category Ia—Strict Nature Reserve, protected area managed mainly for research.
Area of land and/or sea possessing some outstanding or representative ecosystems,
geological or physiological features and/or species, available primarily for scientific
research and/or environmental monitoring.
Objectives of management:
– to preserve habitats, ecosystems and species in as undisturbed a state as possible
– to maintain genetic resources in a dynamic and evolutionary state
– to maintain established ecological processes
– to safeguard structural landscape features or rock exposures
115