Sonny Mumbunan

How is the governance to protect tropical marine ecosystems in times of a changing climate?

Marine plays an extraordinarily important role in the current climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and deteriorating ecosystems. The most prominent policy arrangement to protect marine ecosystems is marine protected areas (MPAs). While this arrangement has been questioned on its own for several reasons (including only “on paper” marine park without active management, its deterioration is no different than outside of marine park, and exclusion of marine-dependent communities for access), the presence of climate change adds external stressors to marine ecosystems. Research has yet to look at how MPAs are impacted by climate change and how their potential governance, as compared to actual one, likely keeps pace with these stressors.

My research is part of a larger project under thematic group “Climate Change and Tropical Marine Conservation” at The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) of The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) that seeks to gain a better understanding on how MPAs are coping in times of a changing climate. The larger project intends to bring together information on what observed impacts of climate change on human and non-human communities in and adjacent to MPAs are and, for this, plans to look at select cases of MPAs in Indonesia and the Dutch Caribbean that represent highly sensitive and biologically diverse tropical marine social-ecological systems. My research intends to reflect on the governance of tropical marine social-ecological system that (re)consider interactions of social-economic conditions with climate and ecosystem changes and contribute to the discussion on building a plausible framework for this.