National award supports grad student’s research on coastal communities

Nathan Bennett, a PhD candidate in geography, is one of 15 grad students this year receiving a highly coveted $180,000 doctoral scholarship from the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. As a 2010 Trudeau Scholar, Bennett will investigate a question that affects lake- and ocean-going communities across the globe: how do coastal communities thrive alongside protected marine parks?

Bennett’s four-year research scholarship will support his combined work on environmental conservation and the reduction of human poverty.

He will examine the relationship between coral reef marine protected areas and local livelihoods along the Andaman Coast of Thailand. There, complex ecosystems like coral reefs require protection but also supply some of the world’s poorest people with sustainable, multigenerational livelihoods.

Bennett hopes to share his research results widely so that other countries, including Canada, can apply the best possible conservation and development practices to their own marine protected areas.

Bennett is a participant in the Marine Protected Areas Research Group in UVic’s geography department, and his project will build on his work with Canadian marine protected areas.

He is particularly interested in how local and sometimes marginalized voices can be brought into discussions around resource management to achieve positive outcomes for conservation and local communities.

“This award will allow me to travel to Thailand and explore several questions related to the complex and evolving relationship between coral reef marine protected areas and local livelihoods,” says Bennett. “Achieving a balance between the conservation and development agendas,” he adds, “will be increasingly challenging on a finite planet that is characterized by a growing population, increasing pressure on natural resources, and rapid global, social and environmental change.”

“Further complicating these issues,” explains Bennett, “is the threat posed by a changing climate to the health of marine ecosystems and the viability of local livelihoods.”

His work will also look at how marine protected area communities can respond to the impacts of climate change. “Marine conservation is also an important issue here in Canada and locally,” says Bennett. “I hope that my research will be locally applicable so that Canadian coastal communities can achieve positive development outcomes within a marine protected framework.”

After earning a degree in education from UVic, Bennett completed a master’s degree at Lakehead University in Northern Ontario. His master’s thesis focused on Lutsel K’e Dene First Nation perspectives on the benefits of conservation and the creation of a national park on the East Arm of Great Slave Lake, Northwest Territories.

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