Nations Are Pledging To Create Ocean Preserves — To What Effect?
Research shows that not all marine protected areas are created equal and the most effective preserves restrict damaging activities.
Billions of people around the world for food, income and . But , and are unraveling ocean ecosystems.
As a , I study ways to improve ocean conservation and management by protecting key areas of the ocean.
Many nations have created or promised to create – zones that may restrict activities like fishing, shipping and aquaculture. But decades of research have shown that , and that the most effective preserves restrict damaging activities.
Tallying Pledges
Many governing bodies around the world have responded to the ocean crisis by pledging to protect swaths of ocean within their territories. To see how these commitments added up, my colleagues and I recently evaluated announced from 2014 through 2019 at the yearly – high-level international meetings initiated by the U.S. State Department. (More recent meetings were canceled during the coronavirus pandemic.)
A number of countries have made ambitious commitments. At the Our Ocean Conferences from 2014 through 2019, 62 countries pledged to protect areas of their ocean. Fourteen nations, including the and , committed to protect more than 38,000 square miles within their waters.
Unfortunately, even if all of these commitments are fully implemented, they will protect only 4% of the world’s ocean. Adding in all other protected areas and outstanding commitments made in other forums raises that figure to 8.9%.
The number is likely to rise as additional countries join in. For example, on May 30, 2022, the South Pacific island nation of Niue pledged to protect . They cover 122,000 square miles – an area roughly the size of Vietnam.
Most recently, the Biden administration proposed on June 8, 2022 to designate , which lies southeast of New York City in the Atlantic and is one of the largest underwater canyons in the world, as a national marine sanctuary. The canyon provides habitat for sperm whales, sea turtles, deep-sea corals and other sensitive species.
Adding urgency to this effort, negotiations at the United Nations continue around a proposed target to protect at least 30% of Earth’s land and sea areas by 2030. , including the U.S., have .
Clearly this is strong progress, but much work remains. Nations have . And meaningful marine protection involves more than stating high-level commitments.
Promises, promises
Today some marine protected areas offer significant protection for fish and other sea life, but others exist mainly on paper.
For example, the Southern Ocean around Antarctica is one of the least-altered marine zones on Earth, but fishing is expanding there, and . Deliberations over two proposed protected areas there, in the and the , have continued for years.
In many protected areas, damaging activities are permitted. For example, the Habitat Protection Zones of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park .
I served on an international team that published a in 2021. Our key message was that effectively conserving ocean habitats and marine life will require working together with local communities and governments to create more marine protected areas and set tighter curbs on destructive activities.
We designed this guide to provide an accurate, science-based picture of how much actual conservation these protected areas will deliver. It complements the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s well-established categories for protected areas – guidelines that the United Nations and many national governments use for defining protected areas.
The IUCN categories describe types of management at various sites. For example, a Category II national park sets aside large swaths of land or sea. But the categories don’t specify what kinds of activities are allowed there or describe their impact. Our guide adds four new elements that are particularly relevant for tracking and decision-making.
First, it identifies whether a protected area is simply a concept, an operational area with effective governance and regulations, or something in between. This is important, because it can take years to move from drafting a proposal to actually conserving a swath of ocean.
Second, the guide outlines four levels of protection: 1) fully protected, with no destructive activities allowed; 2) highly protected, with only minimal human impacts; 3) lightly protected, with moderate impacts; 4) minimally protected, with destructive activities allowed.
This last category can still qualify as a protected area if conserving biodiversity is its primary goal and no industrial activities, like mining and drilling, are permitted.
Third, successful marine protected areas must be planned, designed and managed equitably. An open process is crucial to earn public support. This includes co-managing and incorporating traditional knowledge from Indigenous peoples and the experience of local fishers and other people who use the area.
Finally, once a marine protected area is established, it needs to receive adequate political support and financing, particularly for projects that rely on international investment.
Raising the bar
Applying these criteria will help policymakers develop more effective marine protections and assess what existing protected areas are accomplishing. For instance, measured by these standards, we found that only 3% of all existing and pledged marine protected areas from Our Ocean Conferences would be considered fully or highly protected.
Experts in , , the , and other countries are already using this guide to evaluate existing marine protected areas so that communities and governments can make informed decisions and adjust policies accordingly.
While ocean protection has far to go, I see reason for optimism. At the most recent Our Ocean Conference, in the Pacific island nation of Palau in April 2022, nations made to take steps including creating new protected areas and reducing marine pollution and illegal and unregulated fishing.
These pledges involved some $16.35 billion in funding, on top of $91.4 billion already committed at previous conferences. I believe that if nations use these resources to create the kind of high-quality protected areas described in our guide, there is great hope for conserving ocean life.
Vanessa Constant, associate program officer with the Ocean Studies Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, contributed to this article.
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