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Chapter 9 - How Coral Reefs are Placed on The Decision-Making Agenda
- Kelly Dunning, Auburn University, Alabama
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- Book:
- Democratic Management of an Ecosystem Under Threat
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 28 February 2024
- Print publication:
- 11 July 2023, pp 149-178
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- Chapter
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Summary
Data analysis provided by Research Assistant Kampol Pannoi
In 2021, a group of prominent Democratic and Republican lawmakers from the bicameral U.S. legislature, or Congress, came together to call for new policy to defend American coral reefs from environmental change. In the words of Republican Senator Marco Rubio, “I saw the devastated condition of our coral reefs firsthand when touring the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, and I promised a comprehensive response.” His perceptions on stressors to reefs and the need for their proposed policy, the Restoring Resilient Reefs Act, was nearly indistinguishable from his Democratic colleagues. Given how polarized American politics have been for the past decade, it is important to understand why lawmakers come together and agree upon the urgent need to protect coral reefs from stressors? Is there something inherently special to coral reefs that causes elected leaders to put aside typical partisan grudges and work together to ensure laws are passed to guarantee American reefs survive the era of climate change?
This chapter will review the history of coral reef policy in the U.S. Congress, including a focus on policies that had congressional support from both political parties, and a specific case of reauthorizing the fundamental coral reef conservation law in the United States. We argue that understanding why legislators decide to place coral reefs on the policy-making agenda is important for biodiversity conservation, but may also be a source of common ground over more contentious issues, such as the passing of climate change legislation. Our results can help interest groups message the importance of biodiversity and climate policy to lawmakers in a way that appeals to a range of political ideologies.
History of Coral Reef Policy in the U.S. Congress
The federal government of the United States is broken up into three branches of government: the Executive Branch, which is where the president and federal agencies carry out laws; the Legislative Branch, where laws are made in Congress; and the Judicial Branch, where laws are judged based on whether they follow the U.S. constitution. Congress is made up of two chambers or houses, the House of Representatives and the Senate. The House of Representatives is the lower house, which is generally characterized by early career politicians with more frequent elections every two years who represent a district within a U.S. state based on population.
Chapter 4 - Approaches to Coral Reef Management
- Kelly Dunning, Auburn University, Alabama
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- Book:
- Democratic Management of an Ecosystem Under Threat
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 28 February 2024
- Print publication:
- 11 July 2023, pp 27-44
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
In the face of rapid global environmental change, there has been an interdisciplinary movement among scientists to reconsider how ecosystems are managed. Governing in the Anthropocene, or the age in which human activity has become the dominant influence on the Earth's climate and environment, comes with novel considerations. As the human population continues to grow, interactions between people and the environment are becoming more common and more complicated. These interactions are often described as socio-ecological systems, or the relationships between linked human and natural systems (Folke, 2006; Folke et al., 2005; Ostrom, 2009; Walker et al., 2004).
Due to the fact that coastal communities rely on coral reef ecosystems, the relationships between them are important to consider as a single socio-ecological system (Cinner et al., 2012; Cinner et al., 2016; Kittinger et al., 2016). This means that impacts to the reef, through human action or natural change, can come back to impact human systems like economies and cultures. For example, fishermen access a reef for different species, such as conch, lobster, snapper and grouper. These different anglers might overlap in their target areas, limiting the ability of other reef users, such as divers, to view these species. People looking to develop stretches of the coastline for condos may clear coastal dunes, resulting in cloudier water that inhibits both angler and diver activity. A member of the public that may never even see a reef firsthand might place a high value on a healthy reef merely existing so that they can be passed down to their children. Decision-makers are tasked with understanding these overlapping uses, and designing management systems to balance uses while maintaining essential features of the reef ecosystem.
Dr. Elinor Ostrom, a pioneer of the socio-ecological system concept, likens the complexity of a resource system to the complexity of a biological organism, where many subsystems interact to produce feedback loops which compose a greater whole (Ostrom, 2009). While the idea of a socio-ecological system was initially developed to help explain the interconnected nature of people and their environment, it has since become a staple within the field of natural resources management being applied to topics as diverse as cattle ranching, forestry and coral reef conservation (Berkes et al., 2000; Fischer, 2018; Herrero-Jáuregui et al., 2018; Pendleton et al., 2016; Walker et al., 2004).