TITLE:
Environmental Issues of a Marine Protected Area in a Tectonic Estuary in the Tropical Eastern Pacific: Uramba (Malaga Bay Colombia): Context, Biodiversity, Threats and Challenges
AUTHORS:
Jaime Ricardo Cantera Kintz, Edgardo Londoño-Cruz, Luz Marina Mejía-Ladino, Leonardo Herrera-Orozco, Carlos Andrés Satizabal, Natalia Uribe-Castañeda
KEYWORDS:
Protected Marine Areas; Resources Conservation; Estuaries; Tropical Eastern Pacific
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Water Resource and Protection,
Vol.5 No.11,
November
27,
2013
ABSTRACT:
The environmental protection of tropical marine and coastal areas
faces different challenges due to the diversity of aspects related to these
areas, which include natural, social and economical issues. Despite these
challenges, efforts for the protection of these areas are urgent nowadays
because of the dramatical increase of human related threats like habitat destruction and
population growth. Malaga Bay (MB) is a tectonic estuarine system located in
Panama Bight (central region of the Colombian Pacific coast), which due
to its origin shows important environmental characteristics of few
sites in the Tropical Eastern Pacific (TEP) match. For these reasons, the
government of Colombia declared in 2010, the bay’s marine area as a Marine
National Natural Park in order to preserve its unique estuarine marine
biodiversity. Despite this measure, MB presents several conditions that make
environmental protection a very difficult task. In this paper, we present the
geographical context, biodiversity and natural resources, environmental
threats, the complexity of economic and social context, and the institutional
and legal context of MB, to exemplify the difficulty that the protection of
marine areas face in the TEP.