A guide for planners and managers - IUCN

324 MARINE AND COASTAL
PROTECTED AREAS
19. Bunaken Islands, Indonesia:
Criteria for Zoning
Although they can be useful, criteria often simply show what is intuitively obvious.
Often their greatest benefit is that they allow us to justify what we already know
and to build up a case for proposed zoning plans. Rigorous application and
quantification of criteria generally does not apply in sparsely populated areas.
However, this is important near urban centers and fishing communities where existing
uses will be displaced or modified to suit new objectives.
An area of sea and reefs surrounding Bunaken and its five neighbouring islands
was declared a marine park by decree of the provincial governor in 1980. The site
was later proposed as a National Park (see Case History 1).
Here, tourism is of paramount importance. Conservation of reef biota is also
important, but is a secondary objective. In this case local policy decreed that conflicting
interests of local islanders should be secondary to the design of the marine park. Thus
the principal management objective (conservation of important areas for tourism)
was derived directly from the policy of the governor’s office. The approach used is
explained below.
Procedure
1. Determine the principal and secondary objectives of the protected area (in this
case, tourism was defined as the main objective and conservation as the second
objective).
2. List the activities that require separation into different zones.
3. Define criteria to evaluate different parts of the protected area for various activities.
4. Survey the area in detail to measure scores for each criterion at different sites (reefs,
islands, mangroves, and/or bays, depending on the nature of the site).
5. Sum up the scores of all criteria at each site.
6. Map the area, indicating the locations of areas with higher, medium, and lower values
for each activity of interest. Areas with higher values (i.e., higher criteria scores)
can be given a darker colour and those with lower values shown by a lighter tone.