Hamel, Melanie A., Pressey, Robert L., Andrefouet, Serge, and Hicks, Christina (2026) Fishing-focused marine conservation planning underestimates losses of other ecosystem benefits to local communities. Scientific Reports, 16. 6381.

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Abstract

Incorporating meaningful social and economic information into conservation planning is challenging but critical to minimizing impacts of conservation actions on livelihoods and increasing the likelihood of compliance with restrictions on resource use. The social impacts of conservation reserves are generally included in planning mostly through opportunity costs. For marine systems, these opportunity costs tend to be measured only for fishers. However, the services and associated benefits people gain from their marine environments go beyond food and income from fishing. People also benefit from recreation, aesthetic enjoyment, spiritual connections, medicine, and culture. We explored how conservation planning can be informed and optimized with data on how people value coral-reef ecosystem benefits. We identified and mapped important places, including for fishing, to households of the Riwo (Ziwo) community of the Madang Lagoon, Papua New Guinea, using interviews from heads of households (n = 52). Then, we incorporated data on the multiple benefits of the Madang Lagoon into spatial prioritization with novel cost functions. We found that different places in the Madang Lagoon were important for different reasons, and that designing reserves only to minimise forgone fishing can have incidental impacts on other benefits. We also found that incorporating information on all benefits was the most effective way to minimize the loss of the full suite of benefits, should their access be limited by reserves. We demonstrated how planners can develop approaches that consider all the various costs of conservation that matter to local people.

Item ID:	91211
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	2045-2322
Copyright Information:	This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Date Deposited:	15 Apr 2026 00:40
FoR Codes:	41 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES > 4104 Environmental management > 410401 Conservation and biodiversity @ 50% 30 AGRICULTURAL, VETERINARY AND FOOD SCIENCES > 3005 Fisheries sciences > 300505 Fisheries management @ 50%
SEO Codes:	18 ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT > 1899 Other environmental management > 189999 Other environmental management not elsewhere classified @ 100%
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