Áreas marinhas protegidas e corais brasileiros: o que estamos protegendo?

Abstract

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are important mechanisms for reef conservation, reducing local impacts such as pollution and overfishing, and helping corals to survive global bleaching events. However, many of these areas do not account for climate change in their planning, which may reduce the future protection of corals given that coral distribution is likely to change due to ocean warming. We evaluated the representativeness of zooxantelate shallow-water scleractinian corals and hydrocorals in the current MPAs network in Brazil comparing it among categories (level of protection) and jurisdictions (municipal, state or federal). We used gap analysis to investigate changes in future MPA representativeness along the Brazilian province, under the most extreme scenario predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, RCP 8.5). We observed that 21 coral species are included in MPAs that allow sustainable use and 19 in strict protection MPAs, and there are no predicted differences in coral assemblage composition between categories or jurisdictions. MPAs coincide with the areas of highest occurrence probability for corals in current and future projections, being mostly represented by the sustainable use categories. As environmental conditions change, subtropical regions will experience increases in coral occurrence probability and may become key areas for coral conservation in the future. Therefore, adopting actions which incorporate climate change in the planning of MPAs may contribute to the survival of these organisms.