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4.2. Creating national protected areas

Alongside the work of inventorying sites of special importance for cetaceans (4.1),
each Party will implement a programme of creating marine protected areas in order to
grant, as quickly as possible, legal protection to those sites that have already been
identified in areas under its jurisdiction as being particularly important for cetaceans. A
draft list or preliminary inventory of the sites to be considered for recommendation by
the ACCOBAMS Scientific Committee appears in Appendix 3.

While using their own national procedures that can be applied to create marine
protected areas, it is recommended that the Parties follow the example of the
guidelines and other pertinent tools that are available in the context of international
conventions and organisations. For example, for national areas that could be
expanded or included in proposals for larger high-seas or transboundary areas, a
SPAMI proposal should be considered. On request, ACCOBAMS can help facilitate
the integration of national MPAs into the structures of international conventions and
networks, as well as help assess and facilitate high-seas and transboundary
proposals. Technical support would also be available from RAC/SPA, IUCN MED, and
WCPA MMED.

4.3 An evaluation strategy for creating MPAs

To evaluate the criteria for selecting cetacean protected areas (as noted above), and to
develop a process for identifying which critical habitats to recommend for MPAs – as
well as to determine whether MPA protection will be useful at all – it may be helpful to
employ an MPA evaluation strategy. Such a strategy could be developed and followed
by the ACCOBAMS Scientific Committee for its own use in deciding which areas
containing critical habitats to recommend for MPAs, and it could also be used by
individual countries to aid their selection process.

The following is a first draft attempt at an “evaluation strategy”:

1. Poll experts (Appendix 1) and read literature to obtain candidate critical habitat areas,
best research on them, preliminary threats and conflicts, evaluation and
recommendations on specific areas as critical habitat and rationale for protection (as
summarized in Appendix 3).

2. Expert working group or Scientific Committee (SC) should assess inventory data
(Appendix 1) and literature for gaps in cetacean and threats information.

3. Commission research needed on cetaceans and threats with emphasis on spatial
modeling, though weighing costs as well as time implications of delaying actions
against urgency of precautionary protection. The SC can choose to rely on its own or
invited expert opinion and precautionary approach in making its recommendations.

4. After research or deciding that sufficient information is available, go back to expert
working group or SC and refine critical habitat prescriptions and data in Appendix 3.

5. Following data analysis, apply data to create cetacean habitat maps, using
physiographic features, habitat modeling and other tools.

6. Evaluate the application of the various legal and other tools of conservation available in
the Agreement Area, country by country as well as region-wide, to address cetacean
threats and alleviate or solve cetacean problems. How best can the conservation
problems and conflicts be solved?

7. Is an MPA one of the appropriate conservation tools? Expert working group or SC
should evaluate pragmatically how an MPA might be utilized to help in the solution of
no. 6, but recognizing that it will not be the complete answer to all conservation
problems, and in some cases may not be worth pursuing at all. If an MPA is
determined to be part of the solution, then this step would include design of the MPA,

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