Ratana Chuenpagdee, Virginia Institute of Marine Science

Integrating biophysical understanding of coastal resources and the ecosystems with their socioeconomic importance is one of the top challenges for sustainable management of coastal areas. The former is difficult because of the interconnection of various coastal habitats. The latter is not easy to determine because these habitats have no market value, while some of the products derived from them do. Rather than attempting to obtain complete understanding about these habitats, the approach presented in this paper, called the 'damage schedule', is based on combining existing 'expert' knowledge about coastal habitats with community judgments about their importance. The method relies on the fact that people can make difficult decisions about complex issues in a choice situation (i.e. as relative measure) better than when they are asked to think of them in an absolute term.

The damage schedule is a tool that can assist decision makers in formulating resource management policy that is in accord with the value of the resources. It is developed using a paired comparison method to present various scenarios of habitat damages to different groups of respondents, such as scientists, fishers, shellfish culturers, tourists and members of coastal communities. The respondents are asked to choose, between each pair of damages, the scenario that they consider more severe. An interval ranking indicating the relative importance of these resources is constructed based on these pair-wise responses. The method allows direct comparison between responses from several groups of respondents. The responses can be further aggregated to represent the total respondents if the rankings are not significantly different.

The application of the damage schedule approach on two coastal areas of Thailand is presented. Mangroves were considered the most important habitat for both Ban Don Bay, on the Gulf of Thailand, and Phangnga Bay on the Anderman Sea. In Ban Don Bay, because of the importance of shellfish farming, damage to shellfish culture ground was considered severe, and less so for damage to mudflats. The resulting scale for Phangnga Bay also reflected the importance of coral reefs and seagrass beds.

Once the importance scales are constructed, they can be used to proactively set policy and regulations that can prohibit, restrict or deter activities that can cause damages to coastal habitats. The predetermined damage schedule developed based on these scales offer advantages of cost savings and consistency over current assessment methods. More importantly, as the schedule is based on community knowledge and judgments about coastal ecosystems, policies set using the schedule will most likely be relatively easy to implement.

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