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Threats to California's Marine Protected Areas

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he Center for Ocean Solutions worked in partnership with Resources Legacy Fund to assess threats of human activities on MPAs and analyze existing laws and policies available to address various threats. Program Lead Rebecca Martone and Early Career Fellows Megan Mach and Lisa Wedding led the scientific assessment of threats to MPAs (from climate, land, and ocean based activities), in collaboration with Mary Gleason at The Nature Conservancy, by summarizing non-fishing threats to MPAs on the California coast by MLPA region, using the California Current cumulative impacts model (Halpern et al. 2009). The results of this work identified what human activities or threats still need to be accounted for in the cumulative impact model, and what data would improve the model to support an increased understanding of overlapping impacts to MPAs.

To understand whether current laws and policies address various threats to MPAs, COS conducted legal and policy analyses on three of the primary threats facing California’s protected areas. Early Career Fellow Molly Melius and Policy and Education Manager Ashley Erickson identified strategies for addressing cumulative impacts and Research Analyst Lindley Mease worked with Executive Director Meg Caldwell to distill strategies for addressing ocean acidification. Early Career Fellow Sarah Reiter and Summer Legal Intern Angela Warner worked collaboratively with Sarah Newkirk from The Nature Conservancy to advance laws that address the threats of sea-level rise. These law and policy teams identified “ideal” and existing strategies for addressing each of these threats. Our results will guide strategies for reducing threats to California nearshore ecosystems and inform state-level marine-initiative funding over the next 5-10 years.