A guide for planners and managers - IUCN

The Coastal Zone Approach
Introduction
For marine conservation and area protection one should think of the ocean as
including the bays, lowlands, tidelands, and floodplains along the shoreline and
forming the inner edge of what is called the “Coastal Zone”—a combination of
shallow sea and lowlying land. Here people increasingly congregate to live, work, and
play (Figures 6 and 7). This crowding at the coast is common in many countries, as
in the United States, where half or more of the population lives on the fraction of the
total land that is coastal. These people place a tremendous burden on the coastal
environment, needing living space, support services and industries, recreational
areas, and dump sites for domestic and industrial wastes.
Enhanced economic development is typically perceived as the necessary first
step in a nation’s social development. Coastlines often receive much economic
development in the form of tourism and urban, agricultural, and industrial development.
Unfortunately, the price of short-term benefits from resulting land reclamation,
drainage, or conversion to rice fields,
fishponds, coconut plantations, or
pasturage is resultant pollution and
the depletion of natural resources.
Certain damaging activities, such as
dredging, landfill, coral mining,
fishing with explosives, dumping at
sea, and pollution, are direct and
easy to recognize. Other effects are
not so obvious, especially when they
are far removed from the activity
causing them (for example, hydroelectric
dams across rivers, irrigation
projects, and forest cutting in water-
FIGURE 6.
Pattay in Thailand offers many facilities for coastal recreation.
Crowding of the beach is not uncommon.
sheds). Thus, even inland development programmes must be persuaded to consider
the coastal environment.
It is difficult to protect an MPA sited near a highly developed coastline. Impacts
on coastal ecosystems from land based activities are widespread: industrial and
agricultural pollution, siltation from eroded uplands; filling to provide sites for
industry, housing, recreation, airports, and farmland; dredging to create, deepen, and
improve harbors; quarrying; and the excessive cutting of mangroves for fuel. In many
parts of the world the construction of dams has blocked the passage of marine
species migrating to inland spawning sites (Figure 7). The habitats of many other aquatic
animals also are threatened; for example, roads, housing and other developments have
encroached on turtle nesting beaches.
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Photo by Erkki Siirila.