SNAPP: Delivering Social and Ecological Outcomes From Diverse Coastal Governance Approaches

The Sustainable Development Goals have set an ambitious and inclusive agenda to achieve social targets and protect biodiversity. In coastal ecosystems, management tools such as marine protected areas (MPAs) and increasingly, other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs), are now encouraged to deliver multiple ecological and social benefits. How to achieve these multiple outcomes is limited by a lack of understanding of what socialecological contexts and governance arrangements can enable win-wins for nature and people. This SNAPP group will provide the IUCN, member nations of the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and The Pacific Community (SPC), and a consortium of international NGOs and conservation funders with a decision-support tool to make informed choices about the implementation of MPAs and OECMs. This information is urgently needed leading up to the CBD COP15 and Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework negotiations. Guided by an Advisory Group of end users, a Technical Working group will conduct a meta-analysis of an unprecedented global dataset of coastal social-ecological systems in Kenya, Madagascar, Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and French Polynesia. This data-intensive approach will rapidly synthesize and quantify the contributions of MPAs and OECMs to successful outcomes under different governance arrangements and enabling social-ecological conditions. The results will be used to build a ‘decision tree’, which can guide the selection of optimal management tools to inform policy, practice and investments by groups without access to the same level of data. Ultimately, our working group will deliver evidence-based and scalable solutions to the IUCN, key organizations (FAO, SPC), conservation funders (MacArthur, Vulcan, Bloomberg, Cargill, Blue Action Fund) and international NGOs (WCS, TNC, WorldFish, WWF, CI, RARE) – all influential end users involved in coastal governance and management around the world. Our high-impact outputs will include journal articles, policy briefs, and strategic summaries that will: (1) provide the first global synthesis comparing the social and ecological outcomes of MPAs and OECMs; (2) build a decision support tool that will assist the IUCN, FAO, SPC, NGOs and donors invest in and implement effective coastal conservation and management programs that can meet multiple social and ecological objectives; and (3) inform national reporting on SDGs and negotiations leading up to the CBD Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework.

The information here may be out of date, please refer to https://snappartnership.net/ for more current information.