Arnavon Community Marine Park — Three Communities' 30-Year Co-Management Doubles Hawksbill Nesting

The Arnavon Islands sit in the Manning Strait between Santa Isabel and Choiseul in the Solomon Islands and host the largest hawksbill turtle rookery in the oceanic South Pacific. Exploitation peaked in the 1980s, when over 4,000 adult turtles were killed annually for shell and meat. A national government sanctuary declared in 1976 failed within years: traditional owners, excluded from managing land they considered their own, burned down the government's field station in 1982 and resumed harvesting — a cautionary early lesson that top-down protection without customary buy-in does not last.
In 1995, the communities of Kia, Katupika and Wagina — the customary owners of the surrounding sea and land — came together to establish the Arnavon Community Marine Conservation Area, covering 152 km2 of land and sea across four nesting beaches (Sikopo, Kerehikapa, Big Maleivona and Small Maleivona, totalling 9,416 metres of beach). Community rangers, rather than outside staff, patrol the beaches, tag turtles and enforce a no-take rule the communities set themselves, with support from The Nature Conservancy and the Solomon Islands government.
The conservation results are documented in a peer-reviewed 2015 PLOS One study covering 22 years of monitoring (1991-2012): 4,536 beach surveys and 845 individually tagged turtles. Nightly nest counts rose from a pre-protection average of 1.44 (1991-1995) to 3.85 post-protection (2008-2012), and the remigration rate — the share of tagged females returning to nest again — rose from 6.7% to 13.7%, with two-year remigration cycles appearing only in turtles that hatched after 1995.
In 2017, the site was formally declared the Arnavon Community Marine Park, Solomon Islands' first national marine park — converting two decades of informal customary co-management into a legally recognised protected area while keeping the three communities as its managers.
Read more: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0121435

Read the full analysis: https://marine-conservation.org/blueparks/awardees/arnavon/