Opportunities and barriers to ridge-to-reef marine policy: A review and the role of natural capital accounting

Abstract

Ridge-to-reef (R2R) is a framework for managing connected terrestrial, coastal, and marine ecosystems. Natural capital accounting, standardised internationally in the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA), integrates environmental and economic data, allowing decision-makers to assess trade-offs within and between environmental and economic objectives. The study aims to investigate the opportunities and barriers to incorporating R2R into marine policy and management and the potential of SEEA to address these barriers. We reviewed 49 R2R studies and identified two opportunities (integrated thinking and integrated management options) and three barriers (geographical bias in R2R literature, lack of standardisation, and limited policy uptake). Following the review, we aligned R2R with SEEA to investigate how it could address the barriers. We found that the SEEA addresses the barriers of standardisation and limited policy uptake by providing a standardised framework and metrics for policy-relevant information across terrestrial and marine environments, enabling the identification of upstream impacts on downstream ecosystems, cross-institutional coordination, and integration of R2R into national planning. Moreover, SEEA accounts provide the information needed to manage human impacts on coastal and marine ecosystems adaptively. This includes information for analyses to select the best management practices and to judge the effectiveness of management activity for maintaining ecosystem condition and ecosystem services. We conclude that it is feasible and useful to integrate SEEA to address R2R barriers, and the advantages of incorporating R2R into existing marine policies warrant further investigation. The next step is to test our conclusions through case studies that represent the broad range of social, ecological and economic circumstances in which R2R could be applied. From the case studies and the broader literature, best practices for using SEEA in R2R in marine management can be determined. Ultimately, this enables evidence-based and integrated management that fully addresses upstream impacts on downstream ecosystems for more effective and sustainable marine policies.