Drawing Lessons from Experience in Marine Ecosystem-Based Management

In December 2011, managers from three states and two Canadian provinces celebrated twenty years of working hand in hand to advance marine conservation in the Gulf of Maine. Together, they have leveraged millions of dollars to enable restoration projects, advance scientific understanding, and coordinate monitoring and management on both sides of the border. When they began meeting twenty years earlier, federal officials suggested they were "incredibly naive" to think they could make a difference in what had become a highly contentious environment. The U.S. State Department discouraged their efforts. Recalling this skepticism, one of the group's co-founders laughs and says, "For some of us who are still around, we kind of smile and say, 'Here we are twenty years later!'" From its humble beginnings with the simple objective "to learn and network and share information so that we can all do our respective jobs better," the Gulf of Maine Council on the Marine Environment has become a model for transboundary marine conservation worldwide.

When the federal government established the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary in 1990, outrage ensued. A coalition of fishermen, residents, treasure hunters, real estate interests, and others who despised federal regulation hung signs and banners denouncing the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The sanctuary's first superintendent, Billy Causey, was hung in effigy, twice in a single day. While all shared concern for the region's declining fisheries and frequent vessel groundings in sensitive coral reefs, many people feared a loss of control that would destroy the Keys' unique culture and way of life. Today, residents andfishermen work side by side with state and federal sanctuary managers to protect this iconic resource and the communities that depend on it. They are proud of their accomplishments. Populations of heavily exploited species are rebounding, and vessel groundings have dropped dramatically. As one fisherman recalled, "When we first heard about marine reserves, there was a lot of fear. But once people got involved ... the fear started to fade away."

Oregon's Port Orford Ocean Resource Team (POORT) received the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's 2010 Award for Excellence in recognition of its innovative community-based approach to sustainable fisheries. In 2012, POORT received the Governor's Gold Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Greatest of Oregon, recognizing that the state's first marine reserve had been established at the behest of Port Orford's fishermen. Ten years earlier, fishermen in this community were in a very different place. They felt isolated and unable to influence management decisions that were profoundly affecting their livelihood. Leesa Cobb, a local fisherman's wife, understood the pain and challenges confronting local fishermen and began working tirelessly on their behalf, eventually helping them to establish POORT. "When we started the organization," she recalls, "fishermen were facing a lot of changes. There had been a salmon disaster coast-wide, collapse of our urchin fishery locally, and we were headed into a groundfish disaster. Nothing that was passing as fisheries management was working for us, that's for sure. People were ready for change." The process by which change emerged in Port Orford provides a model of effective community-based stewardship of marine resources.

Throughout the world, at scales large and small and through formal and informal processes, people are working together to advance ecosystem-scale considerations in marine conservation and management. Their task is not easy: marine ecosystems are complex, science is incomplete, stakes are high, and conflict is inevitable. Nonetheless, people in places as disparate as the Gulf of Maine, the Florida Keys, and Port Orford are persevering and making a difference. They are advancing scientific understanding, leveraging resources with which to restore habitats and ecosystems, raising awareness and concern, and demonstrating that progress is possible on seemingly intractable marine conservation issues. Although their stories unfold in unique ways, their experiences reveal remarkably similar lessons with broad relevance to the practice of marine ecosystem-based management (MEBM). What enables distinct places like these to make progress? What challenges do they encounter, and how are these challenges addressed? What advice do those involved offer to others hoping to follow in their footsteps?

Ecosystem-Based Management in Practice

To answer these questions, this book draws from the experiences of places that have been experimenting with MEBM. Few of the people in these places set out to practice MEBM. Rather, they wanted to solve problems like fisheries declines, coral collapse, or poor water quality, and traditional single-species, single-resource, or single-agency approaches had not succeeded. Most realized that they had to expand their focus to a regional scale in order to connect those people and organizations needed to make progress. They built relationships across boundaries to access scientific knowledge, resources, and authorities. Ultimately, most sought integration and balance between users and objectives so that management activity could produce more sustainable outcomes. At bottom, their desire to solve problems where other strategies had not been successful led participants to embrace ecosystem-based management principles.

While definitions of MEBM vary, most include the following five elements:

• Scale: An MEBM perspective encourages use of ecologically relevant boundaries rather than political or administrative boundaries, and often involves management at larger geographic scales and over longer time frames.

• Complexity: An MEBM perspective recognizes marine resources as elements of complex systems and seeks to employ strategies that acknowledge and use complexity in management.

• Balance: An MEBM approach seeks to balance and integrate the needs of multiple human user groups while maintaining the health of the underlying system that supports those needs.

• Collaboration: Since managing across boundaries involves the interests of...