Species and ecosystems within any MPA will have some capacity to adapt to climate change. The question is how much, and how can we use, preserve or enhance this capacity through MPA management and design?

MPA managers face two key challenges: 

1. How to manage adaptation of living organisms within the MPA, particularly as changing conditions lead to a shift from the prior “pristine community” to new ones better fitted to emerging climates, though likely less diverse (Portner et al., 2021)

2. How to incorporate change in the management structures themselves (Wilson et al., 2020). 

Adaptive management and MPAs

Having a wide range of habitats in an MPA, often referred to as “representation”, promotes microclimatic variability and high diversity of individuals and species. This enhances the overall adaptive capacity of the community. For example, complex archipelagos contain many more reef habitats than a straight continental coastline, and may show higher resilience to climate threats.

MPAs with a highly intact biota (that is, the species naturally found in that area at ‘normal’ abundances) in a relatively undisturbed context may contain maximum species diversity as well as genetic variability. They may also provide larval sources that can help other locations recover after major disturbances. However, the presence of species with low resistance to stress that are “naïve” to climate change may result in large losses when climate impacts are first experienced. 

The management structures of an MPA also affect its adaptive capacity. These include its boundaries, zoning, regulations and constraints imposed on users, and the amount of flexibility managers have to respond to events. 

How can I improve the adaptive capacity of my MPA to climate change? 

Biological adaptation occurs through multiple pathways. Moderate levels of stress may enhance adaptive responses as species adjust to changes (acclimation), building up a tolerance “buffer”. Genetic adaptation may also contribute through the selection of individuals that successfully reproduce and pass their genes to the next generation. Although experimentation on such adaptive responses is widespread, successes in field trials may not scale up to the level of an MPA or region. These types of evolutionary responses are also slow relative to the pace of climate change and compounding factors, so may have little impact. 

It is possible, however, to directly support your MPA’s adaptive capacity through various management actions:

A critical element in all of these approaches is detailed information to guide decisions. You should invest in monitoring that is:

• Spatially and temporally representative

• Based on relevant indicators

• Regular (providing data before, during and after any disturbance events)

• Consistent over the long term.

Finally, incorporating MPAs within nationally determined contributions (NDCs) can help drive the legislative change needed to ensure MPA legal frameworks can fully address climate change.

Examples of successful adaptation measures in MPAs

How can climate change adaptation and mitigation be incorporated in MPA design and management?

Adapting to climate change is important, but so too are actions to try to mitigate its impacts. Where adaptation is reactive, mitigation is proactive. Combining both adaptation and mitigation measures in MPA design and management can enhance long-term sustainability of your MPA (Merwin et al., 2020; Roberts et al., 2017).

MPAs can provide many climate change adaptation and mitigation benefits, whether explicitly incorporated into their design or not. Yet a 2021 study found that, out of 647 MPA management plans, only 57% mentioned climate change (O’Regan et al., 2021). 

Roberts et al. (2017) outline eight pathways for MPAs to contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation. These should be considered in MPA design and/or management strategy development phases.

Eight pathways to contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation

The most common example of climate change mitigation in MPAs is protecting mangroves to retain soils that store substantial carbon, reducing potential emissions from habitat conversion. There are several examples of carbon storage potential being evaluated within existing MPAs, particularly across Indonesia, Dominican Republic and Costa Rica. There are fewer, if any, examples of MPAs being specifically designed for this purpose to date. This approach may become more common as it is increasingly recognized in the scientific literature (e.g., Howard et al., 2017) and in national climate policy frameworks. It also links directly with sustainable MPA financing through carbon bonds (Howard et al., 2017) and/or direct support to communities. 

Climate change benefits can be incorporated into MPA design by explicitly including these objectives in the planning process (e.g., targets for carbon sequestration or coastal habitat protection). Your planning should also consider other elements of climate change, such as risk of failure, habitat and species migration, and reducing exposure to climate impacts. Importantly, many of these pathways can be achieved by implementing best-practice design principles.

Beyond the MPA

For successful adaptation, MPA actions need to be upscaled to ecoregions or metapopulations (populations within a species that are reproductively connected). This requires coherence between local management plans and the larger spatial scale regulatory environment (which may correspond to or integrate subnational, national and regional scales). Incorporating this in initial steps of MPA design, including spacing, size and connectivity, would be ideal.

Adaptation will increasingly require coherence across the regulatory regimes of different sectors – such as fisheries and water quality. These may also have different scale dependencies. For example, successful local and national action on local threats also depends on global action to minimize GHG emissions.