Extreme poverty drives the socioecological conflicts in Brazilian Marine Protected Areas

Socioecological conflicts within Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) have a huge impact in conservation outcomes, especially in tropical developing countries, often immersed in a weak enforcement scenario, ineffective management,... [ view full abstract ]

Socioecological conflicts within Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) have a huge impact in conservation outcomes, especially in tropical developing countries, often immersed in a weak enforcement scenario, ineffective management, and lack of funding and human resources. Understand the causes of these conflicts is fundamental to establish proper management solutions. Here we show a broad assessment modelling the diversity of socioecological conflicts in function of several landscape and socioeconomic factors across more than 3000 Km of Brazilian coastline. We quantified the occurrence and type of conflicts from systematic social surveys carried out as part of WWF-Brazil’s RAPPAM assessment and data gathered from news covert by Brazilian media. Socioeconomic and landscape variables were extracted from official statistics and GIS analysis. We identified 461 conflicts cases from more than 35 types in 54 MPAs.  Our results show that the extreme poverty was the major factor explaining almost 60% of the diversity of conflicts within MPAs. Our findings reinforce that conservation interventions may be ineffective when not preceded by focused efforts to alleviate social inequalities. Government and NGOs should target socioeconomic improvement of local communities in parallel with the implementation of MPAs, otherwise the management system will be doomed to failure.