Cabral, Reniel B., Bradley, Darcy, Mayorga, Juan, Goodell, Whitney, Friedlander, Alan M., Sala, Enric, Costello, Christopher, and Gaines, Steven D. (2021) Reply to Hilborn: We agree that MPAs can improve fish catch in the South and Southeast Asia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118 (17). e2100660118.

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Abstract

[Extract] We appreciate Hilborn (1) for reminding us that South and Southeast Asia are the regions where marine protected areas (MPAs) could improve fisheries catches. We fully agree, and in fact, our results indicate that many areas in these regions could benefit from MPAs (figure 1 of ref. 2). We want to clarify, however, that the figure referenced by Hilborn to argue that our results were not credible (figure S4 of ref. 2) shows a future scenario where all fisheries globally are well managed. In that scenario, it makes sense to place MPAs in areas away from the coastal zones to minimize trade-offs with fishing. Nonetheless, while only a small fraction of those regions were included as part of the top priority of a globally optimized MPA network, our global network (figure 2 of ref. 2) is just one solution out of several other network designs that could improve future fish catch. In practice, regions or countries may want to optimize local food benefits from MPAs.

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