- The Philippines pioneered a community-based approach to marine protected area management in 1974, which balanced conservation and community livelihood. This became the blueprint of the more than 1,500 marine reserves in the country today.
- While the government depends on its MPA system in protecting its seascapes and meeting its international commitments, research suggest only a third of the country’s MPAs are well-managed and only protect around 1% of the country’s coral reefs.
- With management and resource challenges, these MPAs are threatened by overfishing and illegal fishing practices as well as the worsening impacts of climate change.
- Experts say strengthening the country’s larger MPA systems, synchronizing conservation with fisheries management policies, adapting newer models, and creating a network of MPAs may help the country buffer the impacts of climate change on its rich marine resources.
MANILA — In the town of Pilar in the central Philippines, a community of 11,308 residents looks after one of the most successful marine protected areas in the country: the Pilar Municipal Marine Park (PMMP). Established in 2005, the 179-hectare (443-acre) park stands out among the thousands of MPAs in the Philippines, which experts say are only protected on paper.
At the heart of the PMMP is a 29-hectare (72-acre) no-take zone, an area where fishing and all other marine activities are banned. Like in all MPAs, these no-take zones are spawning grounds for fish. To balance the livelihood needs of the community, the remaining 150 hectares (371 acres) of the PMMP have been allotted as a marine reserve open to limited fishing activities using non-destructive, basic fishing gear.
Susan Cataylo, a resident of Pilar, says the MPA was a lifesaver when Typhoon Haiyan struck in 2013 and cut her island off from the rest of the province of Cebu. “Camotes is far from Cebu City, which was also devastated by Haiyan,” she tells Mongabay. “If we waited for aid, we would have gone hungry. But the spillover fish from the MPA kept us alive.”
Rene Abesamis, the country’s foremost expert on MPAs, says marine reserves are known as such since they function as “piggy banks” — a stop-gap resource to alleviate community needs during drastic events.
Governments and communities have recognized the importance of MPAs in boosting fish stocks, generating local income through tourism, and cushioning climate change impacts, which in the Philippines manifest as a string of late-season super typhoons from the Pacific. The Philippines puts its MPA system at the forefront of its conservation strategy: In 2020, the country reported protecting 9.7% of its seascapes, narrowly missing its commitment under the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Aichi Biodiversity Targets to protect 10% of coastal and marine areas by 2020.
The underwater rainforest of Verde Island Passage, the richest part of the Coral Triangle. Image by Jeff Britnell / Coral Reef Image Bank
Yet the country’s accomplishments in sustaining its more than 1,500 MPAs have been beset with challenges. Experts say it’s possible that only a third of the country’s MPAs are well-managed, and the collective coverage of no-take zones barely protects the country’s corals.
While some MPAs report high fish abundance, overfishing in the areas surrounding these MPAs and the intrusion by fishing vessels due to weak monitoring and enforcement structures have doomed these reserves to the extent that experts call them “dummy parks” — protected on paper but not on the ground.
Experts point to various “moving parts,” factors that contribute to
the effectiveness of marine protected areas and their promised bounty.
At the top, laws and policies collide and overlap. On the ground,
changing political will and community engagement exacerbated by resource
limitations weaken the effectiveness of MPAs both as a conservation and
a fisheries management model.
Varying levels of protection
Policies in the 1970s and 1980s focused on increasing fish yields, and the string of seas threading through the central Philippines became a playground for fishers using destructive gear. Fishing with cyanide-loaded explosives was the norm, so was the use of trawling techniques called muro-ami, baling-baling and hulbot-hulbot in the Visayan tongue. Despite the ban on these methods, recent studies show that some are still in use today.
The country is considered the “center of marine biodiversity in the world” by the Global Marine Species Assessment of the World Conservation Union, a designation that highlights its importance in the Pacific Coral Triangle. The country’s waters contain the third most extensive reef system in the world, spanning about 22,000 square kilometers (8,500 square miles). Threatened by coastal development, pollution, overfishing and destructive fishing practices, how the Philippines manages its seascapes impacts global marine conservation, a study states.
In the last decade, the Philippines lost one-third of its coral cover, and nearly 75% of the country’s fishing grounds are overfished — figures based on assessments done a decade ago, which means the situation may have worsened today, says Oceana Philippines, a marine NGO.
Coral protection was the focus of the MPA movement in the 1970s, and marine protected areas back then were adapted to allow corals to regenerate and to improve decreasing fish stocks. Initiatives started in two areas: off Sumilon Island, established in 1974, and Apo Island, in 1984. Both located in the central Philippines, these MPAs became the blueprint for the more than 1,500 MPAs that now dot the country’s waters: small, averaging just 15 hectares (37 acres); close to shore; and, most importantly, co-managed by the local government and the coastal community.
Studies by Angel Alcala and Gary Russ of Australia’s James Cook University show that MPAs can contribute directly to fish biomass and diversity. An MPA with limited to no fishing activities can see a rebound in fish stocks, as was the case in Apo Island. By contrast, Sumilon failed to meet its purpose of replenishing fish stocks and coral rehabilitation when it was opened for fishing for 10 years. Both case studies highlight the importance of protecting the most ecologically important part of the seascape, the “core zone,” which is usually the spawning ground for fish.
Apo Island of Apo Reef Natural Park, one of the first MPAs in the Philippines. Image by macoy.mejia via CC BY-SA 4.0)
But to sustain a community-managed reserve requires social preparations, says Abesamis. “You can’t just tell fisherfolk to stop fishing in an area that’s important to their livelihood,” he says. “There’s a psychological impact in creating an MPA and there’s a lot of social preparations necessary to establish one.”
In Sumilon and Apo, locals’ livelihoods were a major consideration, if not the main driving force. Alcala tells Mongabay that the corals around the islands were zoned into two parts: 15-25% of the area of these reefs was within no-take zones, and the remainder was opened to “fishermen using only non-destructive fishing methods.”
While the country’s MPAs started small, Alcala pushed for a bigger system when he was appointed secretary of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) in 1992. He influenced the creation of expansive, government-managed MPAs through the National Integrated Protected Area Systems (NIPAS) Act, which provided legal protection to three marine seascapes in 1992.
It would take 26 years, however, before the Philippines issued a follow-up: In 2018, the government enacted the Expanded National Integrated Protected Area Systems (E-NIPAS), supporting 32 marine protected areas with legislation, and including Apo Island under this protection scheme. Currently, the Visayas region holds the greatest number of NIPAS sites with seven MPAs covering 548,157 hectares (1.35 million acres).
The slow road to legislating government-managed MPAs, prompted local governments and communities to establish smaller ones in the 1990s through the Local Government Code (LGU Code), which gave them power to enact ordinances. This saw the mushrooming of 564 MPAs in the thousands of scattered islands in the Visayas, making it the region that holds a third of the country’s MPAs today.
While NIPAS and E-NIPAS sites receive steady funding from the national treasury, community-managed MPAs depend on a budget allocated by local officials, which are most often sourced from tourism receipts. As such, these sites have different levels of protection, their fates relying on political priorities.