Large-Scale Marine Protected Areas by Decree: Lessons Learned from the Creation of the Revillagigedo Marine Park

Abstract

The increasing speed of the establishment of large-scale marine protected areas (LSMPA) on a global scale has generated intense debate among the scientific community. In this paper, we revise the declaration of the Revillagigedo Marine Park, the largest marine reserve in North America, and propose a framework to assess the potential costs and benefits of having a competitive or a cooperative strategy between the tuna fishing industry and the conservation sector. By framing scenarios in a simple model of the prisoner dilemma and using multicriteria analysis with Delphos—an open-source multicriteria program developed by NGOs for this purpose—we show how conservationists and fishers might have a potential benefit of competing for marine spaces, but not as much as they could gain if they collaborate. Our ultimate goal with this paper is to retrieve the lessons learned in this process to propose a step-by-step process that helps to improve the creation of LSMPAs in the future, thus helping improve the outcome of marine conservation on a global scale.