Economics of Marine Protected Areas: Assessing the Literature for Marine Protected Area Network Expansions

Marine protected areas (MPAs) provide both conservation and economic benefits. Recent international conservation actors have called for a dramatic increase in the area of MPAs from almost 8% to 30% of marine area by 2030 in a policy called 30X30. Both the economics and conservation science literatures consider MPA decisions and MPA impact, although the economics literature focuses on fishery economic outcomes. This review uses an optimization framework for MPA decisions as a lens through which to evaluate the economics literature on MPAs in the context of the 30X30 expansion decisions. We argue for more economic analysis of MPA policy questions, including those around siting, design, restrictions, and management choices; impact evaluation; responses of people; low-income country settings and incomplete enforcement; spatial settings without metapopulations; and conservation rather than harvest objectives. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Resource Economics, Volume 14 is October 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

• Publication year

  2022

• Venue

  Annual Review of Resource Economics

• Publication date

  2022-02-09

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1146/annurev-resource-111820-024652
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• No references are available for this paper.

• A dynamic bicriteria fish war model with fish bank

  2026cites this paper
• Differential Effectiveness of Two Mediterranean Marine Reserves

  2026cites this paper
• The Economics of Designing Protected Areas for Biodiversity Conservation: A Call to Integrate Pre- and Post-implementation Human Threats into Planning

  2026cites this paper
• Fishing activities within Spanish marine protected areas in the Mediterranean Sea

  2025cites this paper
• Fisheries’ Economic Impacts from the Rezoning of the Multi-Use Moreton Bay Marine Park

  2025influential citation
• Fishing for insights: Tailoring a relevant choice experiment to explore low-literate community preferences in the design of marine protected areas

  2025cites this paper
• Developing a marine and fisheries blue economy index for Indonesia: A comprehensive assessment framework

  2025cites this paper
• Global expansion of marine protected areas and the redistribution of fishing effort

  2024cites this paper
• Valuation of ecosystem services in marine protected areas: A comprehensive review of methods and needed developments

  2024cites this paper
• The Environmental Impacts of Protected Area Policy

  2023cites this paper
• A deeper dive into the blue economy: the role of the diving sector in conservation and sustainable development goals

  2023cites this paper
• Building a Practical Multi-Sensor Platform for Monitoring Vessel Activity near Marine Protected Areas: Case Studies from Urban and Remote Locations

  2023cites this paper
• Protected Area Network Expansion and Management: Economics to improve conservation outcomes

  2022cites this paper