A new paper on integrating socioeconomic considerations into spatial prioritization, led by Georgina Gurney and other members of the Conservation Planning Group, is now online in Conservation Biology .
In this study we evaluated two key aspects of incorporating socioeconomic factors into spatial prioritization: treatment of socioeconomic factors as costs or objectives and treatment of stakeholders as a single group or multiple groups. Using as a case study the design marine protected areas (MPAs) in Kubulau, Fiji, we assessed how these aspects affected the configuration of MPAs in terms of trade-offs between biodiversity objectives, fisheries objectives, and equity in catch losses among fisher stakeholder groups. The achievement of fisheries objectives and equity tended to trade-off concavely with increasing biodiversity objectives. Importantly, trade-offs between competing objectives were most severe when socioeconomic data were treated as costs and stakeholders as a single group. While trade-off curves will differ with context, our results suggest that protected area designs produced under the typical approach (i.e. treating socioeconomic data as costs and stakeholders as a single group) could result in suboptimal designs with unnecessarily hard trade-offs between competing objectives. We found that alternative methods for incorporating social factors into protected area design that, importantly, require similar data and expertise, can result in designs with very different impacts to stakeholders.
The final accepted version of the manuscript is freely available here.The published version is available below or by contacting Georgina through email or ResearchGate.
Abstract: The efficacy of protected areas varies, partly because socioeconomic factors are not sufficiently considered in planning and management. Although integrating socioeconomic factors into systematic conservation planning is increasingly advocated, research is needed to progress from recognition of these factors to incorporating them effectively in spatial prioritization of protected areas. We evaluated two key aspects of incorporating socioeconomic factors into spatial prioritization: treatment of socioeconomic factors as costs or objectives and treatment of stakeholders as a single group or multiple groups. Using as a case study the design of a system of no-take marine protected areas (MPAs) in Kubulau, Fiji, we assessed how these aspects affected the configuration of no-take MPAs in terms of trade-offs between biodiversity objectives, fisheries objectives, and equity in catch losses among fisher stakeholder groups. The achievement of fisheries objectives and equity tended to trade-off concavely with increasing biodiversity objectives, indicating that it is possible to achieve low to mid-range biodiversity objectives with relatively small losses to fisheries and equity. Importantly, the extent of trade-offs depended on the method used to incorporate socioeconomic data and was least severe when objectives were set for each fisher stakeholder group explicitly. We found that using different methods to incorporate socioeconomic factors that require similar data and expertise can result in plans with very different impacts on local stakeholders.
