Thank you for the question.
I will say there are two types of process: designing a single MPA or designing a network of MPAs. They are slightly different, and I'm going to focus on the network because that's what we're doing right now.
I'm one of the few specialists who understands completely the mathematical process in Canada that we use and that is used by DFO to do those things. In short, we use a lot of biological data—some of them come from government, and some of them don't—to understand where species are. We also input a lot of socio-economic data, and DFO is selecting which socio-economic data come in. Typically, it's fisheries but sometimes it's transportation or oil and gas. It can be recreational and all that. The goal of the process is meeting biological targets. If we say we want to protect the health of this species, the process is aimed for the health of this species while minimizing the cost on the socio-economic side.
One caveat with that is how much we know about the socio-economic aspects. We know where people fish, what they catch, and what the value of this catch is, but we don't necessarily always know where it's landed, who is going to use it, and all that. There is a bit of uncertainty, but that's related to how good as the data is. On the biological side, no data is perfect. The international guidelines say that, if the data is not perfect, just move forward. Canada has much more data than most of the world's countries, anyway.
The short answer is yes. We measure quantitatively the impact on the socio-economic based on the data that are input in the process, which typically are the value of the catch. Every time a DFO region estimates and looks at that, they know exactly what the impact of this scenario will be on which industry, for which location, based on their data.