Govan, H. et al. 2009. Status and Potential of Locally-Managed Marine Areas in the South Pacific: Meeting Nature Conservation and Sustainable Livelihood Targets through Wide-Spread Implementation of LMMAs. Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme/Worldwide Fund for Nature/WorldFish-Reefbase/Coral Reef Initiative of the South Pacific.
Govan and co-authors updated information from previous studies to develop a regional inventory of locally managed marine areas (LMMAs) current up to January 2008, which was compared with data provided by the World Database of Protected Areas (WDPA) and used in place of “official” country lists.
The results show that the locally managed approach is virtually the only approach to Marine Managed Areas (MMAs) actively pursued at present in the independent countries of the Pacific Islands region. As expected, the author found that most countries do not maintain an up-to-date national list of protected areas. It was found that regional MMA coverage represented under 0.2% of the combined EEZ and only Fiji and New Caledonia were within reach of the global average of 1.5% of EEZ protected with 0.8% and 0.9% respectively.
Govan makes a number of recommendations on the topics of: government and institutional factors, financial and economic considerations, operational and implementation concerns.
