Guidance: Lasting Special Places

Lasting Special Places is a component of the Sense of Place goal which aims to capture how well we are protecting the local coastal and marine systems that we value as part of our cultural identity.

For the Lasting Special Places subgoal, a score of 100 indicates marine regions that hold particular value for aesthetic, spiritual, cultural, recreational or existence reasons are well-protected and healthy.

Marine protected areas can also be used to measure resilience.

Practical Guidance

STEP 1: Identify the special places

Ideally, you would be able to survey everyone in your region to identify the places that are considered special.

The ideal list of special places doesn’t exist in practice, and it can be difficult to capture how people interact with coastal places that have religious or spiritual meaning, historical importance, or provide a general sense of well-being and connection with nature.

One approach we have explored is using social media data (e.g., Instagram, Twitter) to identify coastal places that people visit in high frequency and comment on positively in their posts.

For the global assessment, it was particularly difficult to identify culturally important areas so we used a more general approach. We used the World Database of Protected Areas (www.protectedplanet.net/) to identify the amount and location of protected coastal areas. In this case, if it is protected we assume it is a special place.

International databases, like the World Database of Protected Areas (www.protectedplanet.net/), offer rich information, but they may not be as up-to-date as the list of protected areas in your region. It is also important to keep in mind that protected areas may not overlap in a meaningful way with areas that are actually considered special.

You will need to define the “coastal” boundary. The global assessment incorporated both coastal marine and terrestrial protected areas, such that we included protected area occurring 1km inland and 3nm offshore. We limited the offshore area to 3nm because this is the area that humans are most likely to interact with. But this can be different for different areas. An OHI+ in Fiji used coastal boundaries that were based on fishing regions and depth.

In some cases, the coastal area may be defined by data availability. If only data on marine protected areas is available, the coastal area will only include offshore marine areas.

STEP 2: Measure how well they are protected

The next step is to assess how well the special places are protected. This could reflect the amount of area protected, whether rules and regulations have been established to protect these areas, and how well these rules are promoted and enforced.

For the global assessment, we did not have information on the quality of protection and thus, could only evaluate the amount of protected area.

STEP 3: Determine the reference point

In the case of the global assessment, our reference point was to protect 30% of the inland area and 30% of the marine offshore area. We used 30% protected area as our reference point given the Global Ocean Alliance’s call to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030 (e.g., https://www.oceanunite.org/30-x-30/).
If we had a measure of how well each area was protected we would adjust the observed areas based on protection level.

If your assessment involves multiple categories (e.g., antiquities, MPAs, beaches of special interest), whether you group them together or calculate each category separately depends on reference points. Maybe you want 10% of offshore water to be in MPAs, but only 5% of coastlines to be beaches and 3% Antiquities, for example; in this case, you would calculate them separately and then add them together. But if you want 10% of your country’s coast to have any combination of these things, you would keep them together.

Examples of the Approach