Coastal management cooperation, enforcement key to avoid pending crisis for millions: ...(within jurisdictions while ecosystems ob...)

• Coastal management in most places is insufficiently science-based and proactive, and does not use available tools effectively to reduce human impacts and monitor effectiveness. Consequently, managers and societies adapt poorly and slowly as conditions deteriorate;

• Management programs frequently are not adopted by the local community that depends on the coastal environment for both livelihood and well-being, resulting in a lack of compliance. No management agency has the resources to control human environmental impacts if the people do not support the management goals.

The authors say the lack of scientific underpinning for policy making has made integrated coastal management difficult. In poorer countries this failing can be ascribed to a lack of resources, including trained management agency staff.

But in richer countries, the failure is also widespread, and the consequences are the same management agencies that often treat management exclusively as a game of enforcing regulations, more or less, with little regard to whether the regulations actually do anything useful to address the human and ecosystem impacts of concern.

The report says a great majority of the 4,600 marine protected areas (MPAs) worldwide today, covering 1.4% of the global coastal shelf area, are paper parks legal creations that are not based on scientific understanding of ecosystem protection with little if any regulatory enforcement.

As a consequence, the deterioration of the coastal environment goes on as rapidly inside most MPA boundaries as it does outside, and the effort to establish and then to maintain protected sites is largely in vain.

As well, the authors say, successful local community level actions are seldom replicated or scaled up, wh
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