우리나라 해양보호구역 관련 연구개발 과제의 동향: 미국과의 비교를 통한 함의

Recently, marine protected areas have gained attention as an international response to climate change, prompting various policy developments. Governments have conducted research and development projects to pursue evidence-based marine protected area policies. However, recent criticism suggests that research has focused more on scientific and technical perspectives rather than policy implementation. This study analyzes, from a comparative perspective between countries, the themes and directions of government-led research and development projects that play a crucial role in government policy formation. The study examined Korean government-led marine protected area research and development projects from 2014-2023, evaluating their importance through budget allocation and using text mining to extract key themes. Similarly, U.S. federal government research and development project announcements were analyzed using text mining and Latent Dirichlet Allocation for topic modeling. Results show Korean marine protected area research has a small but growing budget share, focusing on marine environment, ecosystem protection, species conservation, and socioeconomic benefits for local communities. U.S. research emphasizes fishery and ecosystem protection, community-environment interactions, with additional focus on management, climate change, and education for the future generation. The study concludes that Korea's marine protected area research should adopt a more long-term, multifaceted approach focused on conservation objectives and encompassing a broader range of environmental and social issues.