Uncertainty and the Active Adaptive Management of Marine Reserves: WORKING PAPER

This record describes, and links to a working paper produced through the Crawford School of Economics and Government at The Australian National University in Canberra.

Unpredictable environmental fluctuations are a major problem in fisheries. To mitigate these uncertainties, reserves are advocated to help ensure population persistence, reduce population and harvest variance and to provide a hedge against management failures. Using recent insights from the modelling of marine reserves that indicate that reserves can generate a win-win in terms of economic payoffs and ecological benefits, we propose a six-step process for managing reserves with uncertainty and argue in favour of initially establishing less than desirable reserve sizes where stakeholder resistance to reserves may be preventing their implementation.