Perceptions of Threats Facing Cabo de Palos - Islas Hormigas MPA and Potential Solutions

ABSTRACT

Many marine protected areas (MPAs) face a multitude of threats to the ecosystems that they have been established to conserve. This study is based on 111 interviews conducted in 2013–2014 designed to discover the perceptions of stakeholders about the threats, the causes of the threats, and their responses to the threats, to a well-established MPA – Cabo de Palos - Islas Hormigas (CPH-MPA). This MPA was created to safeguard fisheries and the associated artisanal fishers, but over time it has become a tourism “hotspot.” Resilience theory, which incorporates ecological resilience, social resilience, and individual resilience, helps us to analyze stakeholders' responses to threats by categorizing them into passive, adaptive, and transformative responses. We found respondents identified four main threats – over-fishing, excessive scuba diving, pollution, and invasive species; attributed the threats to three main causes – ineffective management, poor environmental stewardship, and climate change; and expressed three kinds of responses – do nothing, adapt, or transform – with a preference for adaptation and (especially) transformation. The lesson of this study is that it shows how, unless drastic action is taken to curb recreational diving activities, the CPH-MPA is in danger of changing from a fishing reserve to a largely unregulated leisure diving venue, which is unlikely to fulfill the requirements of resilience; ecological, social, or individual.

KEYWORDS:

• adaptation
• marine protected areas
• perceptions
• resilience
• solutions
• threats
• transformation

Ethics statement

Permission to conduct this study was granted by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Environment in Spain, and ethics approval was obtained through submission of an ethics assessment to the University of Murcia Ethical Committee. Participants were informed of the aims of the project, how data would be used, and how they could access the study results. Researchers obtained oral consent from participants before conducting interviews. Personal identifying information was replaced with respondent ID numbers to ensure anonymity.

Acknowledgments

We thank the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Food and the Environment; Ministry of Agriculture and Water of the Autonomous Community of the Region of Murcia; related experts, marine resource users and community members of Cabo de Palos- Islas Hormigas Marine Reserve for their collaboration. Special thanks go to Irene Rojo Moreno, Samantha Cámara Blas, Sergio Parra San Llorente, Miguel Lorenzi, and Antonio Calò for their assistance with interviews, and transcription, and Carlos Cegarra for translation. The researchers acknowledge with gratitude that this study received funding from the FP7 – People - Marie Curie Actions – Initial Training Network for Monitoring Mediterranean Marine Protected Areas (ITN-MMMPA) project, Contract No. 290056. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, preparation of the manuscript, or decision to publish.