Effectiveness of Marine Protected Areas in the Philippines for ...

Weeks et al. 7
Figure 4. Frequency of distance
to the nearest marine protected
area (MPA), showing
recommended distances between
MPAs in a network designed on
the basis of predicted larval
dispersal distances taken from
(a) Jones et al. (2008) and (b)
Shanks (2003). All locations are
estimated to be accurate to
within 5 km. Euclidean distance
between MPAs was measured
with the Hawth’s analysis
distance between points ( Beyer
2004) extension for ArcGIS.
in no-take MPAs (Table 2). This fails to achieve Fisheries
Code or Philippine Marine Sanctuary Strategy targets.
To achieve the Philippine Marine Sanctuary Strategy
target of 10% of coral reef area in no-take MPAs, an additional
2030 km 2 of coral reef no-take area is required.
If one community-based no-take MPA were established
per coastal barangay, an increase in the size of no-take
MPAs to 0.31 km 2 would be required (Table 2), which is
almost three times larger than the current median size.
If the maximum historical rate of MPA implementation
(97 MPAs per year in 2002) were to continue, this target
would not be reached until 2076. To meet the target by
2020 would require the designation of at least 545 MPAs
(≥0.31 km 2 )everyyear.
Table 2. Percentage of target area protected under different no-take
marine-protected-area (MPA) scenarios.
1 km Reef
Municipal offshore area b
Scenario a waters (%) (%) (%)
Current 0.48 5.02 1.89 c
Current, plus 1 MPA/coastal 0.27 2.78 7.28
barangay (0.12 km 2 )
Current, plus 1 MPA/coastal
barangay (0.31 km 2 )
1.19 12.2 10.24
a A barangay is the smallest political unit within a city or municipal
government.
b Reef area estimate taken from Spalding et al. (2001).
c Accounts for the reef area only in Tubbataha Reef and Apo Reef
MPAs.
Discussion
Our results provide the first comprehensive nationalscale
assessment of the conservation effectiveness of
MPAs in the Philippines. Results indicate that the current
extent, distribution, and size of MPAs are inadequate
to fulfill conservation objectives at this scale.
Although individual MPAs can achieve local-scale fisheries
objectives (e.g., Alcala & Russ 2006), they do
not constitute a comprehensive national MPA network
that is needed to achieve an adequate representation of
biodiversity.
We estimated that 0.5% of coastal municipal waters
and between 2.7% and 3.4% of coral reef area in the
Philippines are currently protected within no-take MPAs.
This falls well short of legislated targets. Although there
is some uncertainty in our estimate of the extent of MPA
coverage as a result of sites with missing spatial information,
this is unlikely to alter our results significantly.
Assigning minimum (0.01 km 2 ), median (0.12 km 2 ), or
mean (0.28 km 2 ) values to sites with missing size data
resulted in a maximum difference in estimates of 63 km 2
of no-take area. This difference is