Issues & Approaches

The issues

The ocean is critical for sustaining the health of our planet. It contains roughly 97% of our water, produces 50% of our oxygen, drives weather, regulates temperature, and ultimately supports all living organisms. However, while almost 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered by the ocean, only about 8% is protected. Both on land and at sea, the designation of protected areas and the conservation of ecological connectivity between them is key to stemming biodiversity loss and building natural resilience to climate change.

Regardless of scale, the marine environment poses special challenges for connectivity conservation and has its own specialized scientific expertise, technologies, and management tools. Marine space is unique not only in its dynamic natural features and processes but also in the science and management challenges posed by deep, off-shore waters, linkages with land and the high seas, different tenure systems, and more scientific uncertainty. However, connectivity research in marine systems remains much less advanced than for terrestrial systems and the science is less-well developed.  To address this imbalance and respond to the special need, the MCWG brings together marine experts from multiple disciplines to collaborate around the world.

Solutions

Connectivity for the marine and coastal environment

There are special challenges to maintaining and enhancing marine connectivity, especially in the face of climate change.  Drawing from conservation planning literature, we know that designing applicable measures requires being scientifically informed about the complexity of interactions between specific marine protected areas (MPAs), other effective conservation measures (OECMs), and ecological corridors. Additionally, applying projections and modelling is useful to design for “climate-wise connectivity” which includes planning for population persistence, range expansion, or shifts over time.  Scenarios include:

• Conservation areas predicted to remain climatically stable through time (i.e. climatic refugia);
• Areas for expansion of already established conservation areas;
• Functional networks of protected areas to safeguard processes running at a regional scale;
• Climate-gradient corridors; and
• Areas where species range-adaptation to climate change is more likely.

Ecological connectivity and climate change

Among the critical services provided by healthy oceans and coasts are subsistence and commercial fisheries, climate regulation and stabilization, coastal protection, and flood control. This ecological resilience to climate change in coastal and marine ecosystems is a combination of resistance to increasingly frequent and severe disturbances, capacity for recovery and self-organization, and the ability to adapt to new conditions.

Underlying resilience are three broad categories of ecological properties: diversity, connectivity, and adaptive capacity. Specifically, connectivity conservation cuts across these properties and looks beyond static geographical units (where species may not be in the future) to promote the health and vitality of fluctuating natural processes with which biodiversity and climate change are intertwined. In this way, while plants and animals are either shifting habitat, changing life cycles, or developing new physical traits in response to climate change, ecosystems concurrently provide supporting services. Predominantly, this includes storing carbon, removing atmospheric carbon dioxide and other pollutants, and maintaining intact systems that buffer impacts of long-term processes and short-term disastrous events.