Constructing a social-ecological economic network of community-based marine restoration initiatives

The world’s oceans and coastal areas have been severely impacted by multiple anthropological stressors. Coastal and marine managers, scientists and organisations around the world look to active ecological restoration measures to help slow the decline of ecosystem health and boost the natural recovery of ecosystems. Marine restoration, while heavily reliant on ecological knowledge, is a human-driven activity that can involve multiple stakeholders and local community groups. Therefore, understanding how marine restoration can provide benefits beyond ecosystem health can be useful in gaining future interest and investment in restoration efforts. We use a social-ecological approach to explore the benefits of community-based marine restoration projects. A Bayesian-belief network was constructed to map out the key social, ecological and economic factors and identify bottlenecks constraining positive outcomes. A range of scenarios was used to explore relationships between the state of ecosystem health prior to restoration and the priorities of the restoration outcomes. While our analysis found that place-based context dependencies are important, restoration actions in areas that were in poor ecological health were found to have greater social returns. Ecological gains were not necessarily tied directly to social and economic gains, demonstrating that even when ecological improvements are slow, benefits can be realised in social and economic domains. The model provides a useful heuristic to open the dialogue on what steps or processes (social, ecological or economic) people or organisations might need to consider when wanting to carry out restoration projects, either prior to beginning or during the restoration.