26 Integrated Conservation Management

Integrated Conservation Management – Area-based Management tools (ABMT)

With the accelerated goal of conserving 30% of marine and coastal areas by 2030, it is important to consider a range of management tools which incorporate not just environmental protection, but also include cultural, social, and economic factors. Area-Based Management Tools (ABMT) are conservation and management tools across a spatial area including anthropogenic activity regulation such as fisheries, integrated tools that utilise more holistic, ecosystem-based approaches such as marine protected areas and marine spatial planning (Gissi et al., 2022).

Integrated Conservation Management

Marine conservation needs to take an integrated approach to protecting the environment by considering the interconnected components of the environment, including humans, stakeholders including industry, government, the community and traditional custodians. Ecosystems based management (EBM) implements policies and management practices to maintain a healthy, resilient ecosystem (Cormier et al., 2017). An ecosystem-based management approach is applied to marine spatial planning (MSP). In MSP works to design a framework to assesses different marine uses and where and how they can take place and interact to protect cultural, social, economic values linked to ecosystems (Marine and Coastal Policy, 2020). Marine protected areas (MPA) which may be no take areas or those that restrict particular activities, are integrated as part of an ecosystem-based marine spatial planning.

Ecosystem-based Marine Spatial Planning

Click on the sections below to learn more about ecosystem-based marine spatial planning overall and in Victoria.

This text is from “Marine and Coastal Policy” by © The State of Victoria Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning 2020, which is licensed under CC BY 4.0, except for the introduction and Integrated Conservation Management, which has been added by Trish Corbett.

Follow the QR code below and watch the video to learn more about Victoria’s MSP framework.

Marine Protected areas

Marine Protected Areas – Introduction

This text is adapted from “Evaluating the biological effectiveness of fully and partially protected marine areas” by Marija Sciberras, Stuart R Jenkins, Michel J Kaiser, Stephen J Hawkins & Andrew S Pullin is licensed under CC BY 2.0

A review of marine protected area success was carried out by Lester et al., in 2009 indicated that with marine protection, there can be an up to 446% increase in biomass, 166% increase in density of organisms (mean 194% and 61% respectively), as well as up to a 28% increase in individual size (21% average), and 17% increase in species richness (15% mean).

Marine Protected Areas – Design

Watch the videos below to learn more about MPA’s and the importance of design, areas selected to be protected and the need to use a spatial network of MPA’s to protect the whole life cycle of species and important habitats.

Video from the Conservation Strategy Fun on ‘Fisheries Economics and Policy: Marine Protected Areas’:

Video from Rare Hub on ‘Networks of Marine Reserves’:

Marine Protected Areas – Global and Australian Distribution

Globally, there are over 15000 Marine Protected areas (Figure 1) and 60 marine parks are managed by Parks Australia (Figure 2).

This map and its associated caption is from the “Marine Protection Atlas” via Wikipedia, by Russell Moffitt for the Marine Protection Atlas at Marine Conservation Institute, which is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

This map is from the “National Reserve System, National Representative System of Marine Protected Areas and Sea Country Indigenous Protected Areas” by Environment Data & Analysis Branch, Australian Government Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water © Commonwealth of Australia, February  2025 which is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Marine Protected Areas – Victoria

Parks Victoria manages 13 large marine national parks and 11 smaller marine sanctuaries which are fully protected no-take zones.

Watch the video below to learn more about Victoria’s Marine Protected Areas and how Parks Victoria protects our marine and coastal environment.

Watch the video below to see some of the fantastic work that Deakin’s Marine Mapping Group have done on Victoria’s MPA’s.