Canadian, American, and Transboundary Approaches to Marine Protected Area Planning in the Salish Sea

Abstract

The ocean is perhaps Earth’s greatest source of environmental, economic, and sociocultural significance. However, the impacts of human activity—from anthropogenic climate change and overfishing to resource extraction and coastal population rise— threaten its most crucial functions. Ocean conservation is one strategy for protecting marine areas from overuse; marine spatial planning advances ocean conservation through regulation of human activity in marine zones. One common application of marine spatial planning is Marine Protected Area (MPA) designation. While MPAs are popular tools to manage activity in areas with high ecological and/or sociocultural value, they lack consistent frameworks to guide implementation or evaluation, and are thus difficult to assess and improve. This research catalogued all marine protected areas in an American and Canadian transboundary waterway, the Salish Sea, and evaluated their success according to each MPA’s founding governance body using two proxy success metrics: conservation rigor and implementation strength. I selected this transboundary region to compare how differing governance entities and formats approached MPA planning when faced with shared regional challenges. My analysis examined whether MPAs designated at state or provincial levels had 1) higher levels of conservation rigor and 2) higher levels of implementation strength than MPAs formed at other levels of governance. To assess this, I compiled a unique geospatial database of all MPAs in the Salish Sea bioregion and categorized them according to key attributes including area, location, presence of management plans, type of governing authority, and conservation designation. Following a literature review of MPA evaluation frameworks, I devised two proxy metrics for success based on the presence of criteria denoting conservation rigor and implementation strength, and allocated a score of increasing rigor or strength from levels 1-3 for each MPA in the region. I then compared each site to determine whether the type of governing authority was a predictor of MPA success. My analysis revealed that MPA designation at the state or provincial level was ultimately not a predictor of success as measured by either implementation strength or conservation rigor in all cases but one: British Columbian MPAs with the highest strength of implementation were governed mostly at the provincial level as opposed to the federal. Instead, my analysis underscored that MPAs formed among multiple governing parties were more likely to be crafted with higher levels of conservation rigor than those formed by singular governance authorities. This finding highlights the importance of collaborative governance frameworks for achieving ambitious marine conservation targets, and suggests that effective MPAs in both the Salish Sea and beyond might benefit from joint governance models to yield optimal conservation results.