What should happen where within Ghana’s first Marine Protected Area?

That question is at the heart of an important new phase in the journey towards making the Greater Cape Three Points Marine Protected Area (GCTP MPA) fully operational.

Across all 20 MPA communities, Hen Mpoano has facilitated participatory marine spatial zonation activities, bringing together fishers, traditional leaders, women, youth and other stakeholders to contribute their knowledge and perspectives on how different areas within the MPA should be used, protected and managed.

The exercise marks another important step in moving Ghana’s first Marine Protected Area from declaration towards effective management, while ensuring that the people who know, use and depend on these waters remain central to the process.

What does zoning mean for an MPA?

Declaring a Marine Protected Area establishes the geographical space to be managed for conservation and sustainable use. Zoning helps translate that broader vision into practical management by determining how different areas within the MPA may be used and the levels of protection or management they may require.

For the Greater Cape Three Points MPA, this means understanding where important fishing grounds are located, which areas serve as breeding and spawning grounds, where sensitive ecosystems occur, and how different marine and coastal resources are already being used by communities.

Rather than developing these zones solely through a top-down technical process, the GCTP approach places local knowledge and community participation at its core.

Putting local knowledge on the map

During the community zonation activities, participants identified important fishing grounds, rocky reefs, lagoons, mangrove ecosystems, fish breeding and spawning areas, and other ecologically significant sites, including areas associated with marine wildlife such as whales and dolphins.

Communities also identified some of the pressures affecting these resources, including illegal and destructive fishing practices, increasing pressure on fishing grounds, damage to reef habitats, mangrove degradation, illegal mining and other human activities.

Beyond identifying places on a map, the discussions provided an opportunity for communities to express how they believe different parts of the MPA should be managed, taking into consideration both the protection of critical ecosystems and the livelihoods that depend on them.

This is particularly important because the sea does not follow community boundaries.

Fishing grounds may be shared by several communities, ecosystems are interconnected, and proposed uses or protection measures in one area may have implications for neighbouring communities. The 20 community exercises therefore represent individual pieces of a much larger picture.

From 20 community maps to one shared framework

With the community-level zonation activities completed, the next phase will bring the different perspectives together.

Information and proposed zones gathered across the 20 communities will be reviewed and harmonised, alongside further technical assessments, to address overlapping uses, shared fishing grounds and areas where different community proposals may intersect.

The harmonised proposals will then be presented to Government to inform the finalisation of the MPA zoning framework.

Importantly, the process does not end there.

The outcomes will be taken back to the communities for validation, providing another opportunity for the people whose livelihoods and communities are directly connected to the MPA to review how their knowledge and proposals have been reflected.

It is a process that moves from community knowledge, to harmonisation, to Government, and back to the communities  reinforcing the bottom-up approach that has shaped the Greater Cape Three Points MPA journey.

From declaration to effective management

The zonation process is one of the important building blocks required to translate Ghana’s first Marine Protected Area from a declared space into an effectively managed marine area.

For Hen Mpoano, that transition is not only about establishing management systems and protecting critical ecosystems. It is also about building the community ownership, trust and shared responsibility needed for those systems to work in practice.

As the Greater Cape Three Points MPA enters this next phase, the knowledge gathered from the 20 communities provides an important foundation for decisions about how these shared marine resources can be protected, sustainably used and managed for the future.

Written by:  Doe Bona-Mensah