Accounting for the Importance of Ecosystem Services and Benefits to Local Communities in Marine Systematic Conservation Planning: It’s Not All About Fisheries

Incorporating meaningful social and economic information into conservation planning is challenging but critical to minimizing impacts of conservation actions on livelihoods and increasing the likelihood of compliance with restrictions on resource use. The social impacts of conservation reserves are generally included in planning mostly through opportunity costs. Furthermore, for marine systems, these opportunity costs tend to be measured only for fishers. However, the services and associated benefits people gain from their marine environments go beyond food and income from fishing. People also benefit from recreation, aesthetic enjoyment, spiritual connections, medicine, and culture. We explored how conservation planning can be informed and optimized with data on how people value coral-reef ecosystem benefits. We identified and mapped places of value, including for fishing, to households of the Riwo community of the Madang Lagoon, Papua New Guinea, using interviews from heads of households (n = 52). Then, we incorporated data on the multiple benefits of the Madang Lagoon into spatial prioritization with novel cost functions. We found that different places in the Madang Lagoon were valued for different reasons, and that designing reserves only to minimise forgone fishing can have incidental impacts on other important uses and values. We also found that incorporating information on all benefits was the most effective way to minimize the loss of the full suite of values, should access to related uses be limited by reserves. We demonstrated how planners can develop approaches that take into account all the various costs of conservation that matter to local people.