Marine protected areas aren’t as protected as you think

Earlier this year, ocean conservation advocates celebrated what seemed like a major milestone: 10 percent of the Earth’s oceans had been officially designated as protected marine protected areas. In theory, this meant that world leaders had successfully implemented varying degrees of fishing restrictions and regulations across a tenth of the oceans’ surface area in an attempt to reduce pressures on ecosystems and help them thrive. It also signaled progress toward a United Nations goal, known as 30×30, to conserve 30 percent of the planet’s land and ocean area by 2030. But new research in the journal PNAS suggests that the 10 percent figure is misleading. It found that only a small fraction of implemented marine protected areas, or MPAs, are actually making a substantial difference for the ecosystems they’re supposed to protect — largely due to low compliance with fishing restrictions. Conservatively, the authors estimated that just 2 percent of the oceans are covered by MPAs where ecosystems are recovering. The research raises questions about the broader 30×30 approach, which focuses on a protected area’s’ square mileage rather than their efficacy. The authors said there’s a need to think beyond area-based conservation metrics and consider what’s really happening to aquatic life. “There’s this large disconnect between what we think is effectively protected globally, which is now 10 percent of the oceans, and what’s actually effectively conserving marine ecosystems underwater,” said Ella Clausius, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Tasmania and the lead author of the paper. The conservation world’s focus on this approach emerged in the early 2000s. At a U.N. meeting in 2002, world leaders agreed to establish networks of MPAs, but without setting a target for how much ocean they should cover. Two years later, at a meeting of the Convention for Biological Diversity, the U.N.’s major treaty on protecting life on Earth, countries introduced a quantitative goal, formally agreeing to conserve “at least 10 percent of each of the world’s ecological regions,” in large part through protected areas. A subsequent meeting in 2010 updated the goal to protect 10 percent of the oceans specifically by 2020. When that goal was missed, 30×30 became its successor as part of a broader agreement called the Global Biodiversity Framework. Angelo Villagomez, a senior fellow focusing on Indigenous-led conservation policy for the Center for American Progress, said the reason countries have rallied behind a quantitative, area-based target is straightforward: “It is easy to measure and communicate.” Scientists understood this simplicity to be critical for securing political support for conservation, and at the time this outweighed concerns that, for example, MPAs would be created in remote areas that didn’t have much biodiversity to begin with, or that governments would create “paper parks” without implemented conservation measures. Fast-forward to today, however, and it’s worth asking whether the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on MPAs annually actually are helping marine life. Are these designations increasing fish populations? Or just the percentage of ocean area covered by them? To answer this question, Clausius’ team created a pair of models. The first used real-world observational data from protected and unprotected shallow reefs to estimate the effects of several hundred protected areas on marine biomass. The researchers then linked those effects to four measurable characteristics of such locations — level of protection, compliance with fishing regulations, size, and age — and used those relationships to estimate conservation effects for the majority of the world’s MPAs that lack observational data. Their results suggested that only a fifth of the area currently covered by MPAs is actually “ecologically effective,” which they defined as contributing to a doubling in fish biomass. This is partly because so few areas offer full protection from fishing, which scientists say is necessary to deliver the best conservation benefits, and partly due to poor management in other areas. Indeed, Clausius said violations of fishing restrictions are so widespread that it’s not uncommon to see compliance officers breaking the rules. They visit protected areas and then cast fishing lines off the back of their boats, she said. “They know they can get the big fish there.” Read Next Clausius and her team’s findings add weight to longstanding criticisms of the effectiveness and equity of 30×30, particularly its emphasis on the size of MPAs. Callum Roberts, a marine conservation professor at the University of Exeter in the U.K., offered two alternative metrics to focus on: Each area’s level of protection from fishing and other commercial activities, and its “stage of establishment,” ranging from proposed to actively managed. Another researcher, Bruce Mann, with the South African Association for Marine Biological Research, suggested a framework called NEOLI, which describes five characteristics of MPAs — “no-take, enforced, old, large, and isolated” — as appropriate indicators of MPA effectiveness. Of course, those are still just proxies for what conservationists ultimately want to measure: ecosystem health. But it’s hard to come up with a universal metric for this, according to Clausius, because ecosystems differ so dramatically and face different threats. Fish biomass might be appropriate for areas struggling with overfishing, but it wouldn’t be as useful a metric for MPAs primarily intended to protect against deep-sea mining. Villagomez defended 30×30 as a useful political pledge. “It has elevated environmental protections to the highest levels of government around the world,” he said. “It’s unlocked millions of dollars of funding. Leaders of countries all around the world agree that we need more ocean conservation, better conservation, and that we need it faster than ever.” But he agreed with other experts who argue that 30×30 has contributed to a problematic focus on the size of an area. One alternative he’s been developing for the U.S. would prioritize “beloved ecological areas and coastal habitats” in each of the 35 coastal or Great Lakes states and territories — areas that are close to where people live and recreate, in contrast to what he’s described as “large, distant, isolated protected areas.” George Branch, an emeritus biology professor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, said the 30×30 target is “overambitious,” and that at this point it may be more helpful to improve the effectiveness of existing MPAs than to add more. Another reason to think beyond 30×30 is the need for better ocean management everywhere. “We can’t just do whatever we want in the other 70 percent of the oceans,” Clausius told Grist. In areas where total fishing bans aren’t appropriate, whether for cultural, subsistence, or commercial reasons, there are still ways to protect ecosystems from pollution and overexploitation, such as by setting science-based catch limits or restricting coastal development. “It needs to be a global oceans picture,” Clausius added.