Dynamic Coasts, Evolving Laws: innovative approaches to flexible marine ecosystem restoration

The coastal marine environment is a social-ecological system that is inherently fluid and highly dynamic – the relationships between marine ecosystems and social systems are multifunctional, multiscale, complex and fluctuating. In Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ), like many other countries around the world, the coastal marine environment is increasingly under threat from competing human uses and climate change which are affecting marine ecosystem resilience and contributing to marine biodiversity decline.  Impacts are further exacerbated by a preservation-focused western regulatory framework, underpinned by colonialist limitations and static approaches (such as traditional area-based management tools), which fail to recognize the marine environment as a social-ecological system and are not well suited to govern an acting and shifting environment. 

As NZ (and other coastal nations) grapple with these issues and seek to meet international biodiversity obligations, marine experts across a range of disciplines are increasingly advocating for a shift away from traditional static preservation/protection approaches to more adaptive legal frameworks that support flexible and dynamic marine ‘restoration’ at appropriate scales. However, there is uncertainty and lack of consensus in international scholarly and policy debates about how marine laws and policies can be sufficiently flexible to cope with the dynamic nature of marine ecosystems and the multi-scale and complex challenges presented by the climate-biodiversity-extinction crisis.