A globalized robust preemptive goal programming method for marine reserve problem with eco-economy tradeoffs and multiple uncertainties

“Blue growth” emphasizes the sustainable use of marine resources for economic process whereas conserving the health of marine ecosystems. Motivated by this, we focus on the marine reserve design problem under multiple uncertainties, incorporating conservation, economy, reserve area and reserve shape compactness. We develop a novel globalized robust preemptive goal programming model to investigate the problem, where inner-outer uncertainty sets are defined to model the uncertain conservation value and opportunity cost. We thereby derive the tractable globalized robust counterpart of the proposed model and perform the model analysis on the globalized sensitivity parameters. Our proposed optimization framework can be demonstrated for the marine reserve design of West Coast National Marine Park of Qingdao in China. The computational experiments justify several important insights: (i) the resulting reserve area design is more robust than the delimitation of 2014 on the West Coast New Area; (ii) with the change of parameters related to uncertainty sets and global sensitivity, the conservation value can always be realized while the opportunity cost is sensitive; (iii) the comparison results with classic robust optimization method show that the proposed method can reduce the conservatism of decisions and enable planners to formulate more effective policy.