New paper: Community management yields positive impacts for coastal fisheries resources and biodiversity conservation

Implementing no-take reserves may benefit marine ecosystems, but at the potential cost of the fishers they displace. Combining no-take areas with areas of exclusive fishing access could provide the required incentives for community management to achieve positive impacts. However, not many protected areas have been assessed for their impact, which involves applying counterfactual thinking to predict conditions within protected areas if management had never occurred. In this recent paper, we used a process called statistical matching to perform an impact evaluation of Tonga’s marine management program, the Special Management Area program. In Tonga, communities are granted exclusive access to an area of reef for fishing, but only if a portion of that reef is designated a permanent no-take reserve. Our research found that no-take reserves in Tonga generally improved the biomass, density, and size of target species, as well as overall species diversity. However, we found no evidence of changes within the exclusive access zones, where community members were still allowed to fish. Our findings suggest that dual management is an effective tool for incentivizing community-based no-take areas for biodiversity conservation and fisheries management.