News Release

Marine Conservation Institute Commends IUCN’s Commitment to Protecting the Ocean’s Twilight Zone

By Marine Conservation Institute | October 14, 2025

Today, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) voted to pass Motion 035, “Protection of mesopelagic ecosystem integrity,” at the World Conservation Congress in Abu Dhabi. This landmark decision calls for applying a precautionary approach to the expansion of mesopelagic fishing while we work to better understand the adverse impacts of human activities on this vast and vital ecosystem.

Video posted by IUCN highlighting the passage of the motion to protect mesopelagic ecosystems.

The mesopelagic—or “Ocean Twilight Zone”—extends from roughly 200 to 1,000 meters deep and is home to an immense portion of the ocean’s life, possibly up to 90 percent of its biomass. Every night, many of these organisms migrate toward the surface to feed, playing an essential role in transporting and sequestering billions of tons of carbon each year—an invisible but powerful process that helps regulate Earth’s climate.

“The mesopelagic zone is one of the planet’s largest and least understood ecosystems. Its species are critical to maintaining biodiversity, climate regulation and food web stability across the ocean,” said Dr. Lance Morgan, President of Marine Conservation Institute.

Ms. Elle Bent, High Seas Project Coordinator for Marine Conservation Institute, who participated in the motion’s development, stated, “By passing this motion, the IUCN and its members have taken a forward-looking step toward precautionary, science-based stewardship of a system that underpins the health of our planet.”

The passage of Motion 035 underscores the growing global recognition that a healthy ocean requires protecting even the deep and unseen. Dr. Morgan, summarized the significance of the vote, “With this decision, the international community is signaling its commitment to ensuring the mesopelagic remains a thriving, living engine of climate stability and biodiversity.”

Teams consult with IUCN member states and organizations to revise the final text of IUCN Motion 035 before going to a vote.

Support our Critical Work Protecting Wild Ocean Places

The post Marine Conservation Institute Commends IUCN’s Commitment to Protecting the Ocean’s Twilight Zone appeared first on Marine Conservation Institute.

The post Bottom-contact fishing persists in protected deep-sea habitats despite EU closures, new study finds appeared first on Marine Conservation Institute.

New Ocean Conservation Priorities that Deliver on the Promise of America the Beautiful

Explore the report and interactive website

At Marine Conservation Institute we’re always looking for ways to highlight important ocean conservation initiatives in the US and around the world.

Working to strengthen marine sanctuaries here in the US and raising the stature of the world’s best marine protected areas with our Blue Parks and Blue Sparks awards is key to our goal of protecting the ocean’s most important places for current and future generations. When we had the chance to help create a StoryMap—an online interactive website—that celebrates community-driven efforts in the US, we were excited to help. Today, that story map highlighting the efforts of eight Indigenous, Tribal, and community-led groups around the country is ready to spread the good news about efforts to create new areas and strengthen existing ones to protect our coasts, preserve marine life, and fight the impacts of climate change.

Launch the StoryMap

Launching the same week as the fifth US National Climate Assessment, which paints a comprehensive picture of increasing climate change impacts in the US, and about one month before a convening of worldwide leaders will discuss the fight against global climate change at COP 28—this new report and website on areas that will help the US fight climate change is important. We need those places to be designated, protected, and managed for conservation and sustainable livelihoods. Shortly after the Biden-Harris administration was sworn in, it made historic commitments to equitably mitigate the adverse impacts of a changing climate and to conserve and restore America’s lands and waters. Called the America the Beautiful Initiative, these commitments are beginning to create and strengthen ocean protection as a key climate solution. The new report and StoryMap demonstrate how these diverse places will deliver on climate-focused marine conservation if they come to fruition. 

From the Florida Keys to Alaska’s Aleutian Island chain, Tribal, Indigenous, and community-led proposals provide a unique opportunity to address the climate crisis and ensure that all people can benefit from an effective, inclusive, and representative system of coastal and marine protected areas.

Coastal and marine protected areas create a series of interconnected benefits: They are a bulwark against climate change, absorbing carbon emissions and buffering shifting coastlines. They are a refuge for wildlife, protecting the beautiful diversity of marine ecosystems. They are sometimes sacred sites for Indigenous and Tribal communities, preserving culture and heritage. They are laboratories for scientific research on climate change, improving understanding of biodiversity; and some are outdoor destinations just like national parks, providing spaces for tourism and recreation. 

For years, Tribal and Indigenous communities and other local community leaders have proposed and stewarded conservation actions for our ocean and coasts. Grounded in science, culture, history, and economics, these actions are broadly supported and can contribute significantly toward the President’s commitment to protect at least 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters by 2030, ensure equitable access to nature, and act on climate. Implementing these proposals would also deliver on the Administration’s stated commitment to supporting locally-led and Indigenous-led conservation actions.

Explore the report and interactive map to learn more about each of the eight proposals, specific recommendations from local community leaders, and how you can take action to support them.

Launch the StoryMap

View the Report

The post New Ocean Conservation Priorities that Deliver on the Promise of America the Beautiful appeared first on Marine Conservation Institute.

Can the Biden-Harris administration move forward with America the Beautiful Plan if NOAA and Regional Fishery Management Councils Move Backwards?

Friday, April 29, 2022
Seattle, WA, USA

Contacts:

The National Marine Fisheries Service of the National Oceanographic and Oceanic Administration (NOAA) published an amendment today to a fisheries management plan in the Federal Register that proposes to re-open part of the world’s first deep-water coral marine protected area to the destructive practice of shrimp bottom trawling. The area, known as the Oculina Bank Habitat Area of Particular Concern, was first protected from trawling by NOAA in 1984 after 90% of the coral reef had been destroyed by shrimp and other trawlers in the 1970s and 1980s. This particular form of deep sea Oculina coral reef is found nowhere else in the world, according to marine conservation scientists, and supports populations of fish prized by recreational fishermen that are overfished in the South Atlantic.

A total of 37 organizations, 14 Florida organizations, zoos and aquariums, and 23 national environmental organizations representing millions of members released a letter to NOAA Administrator Spinrad and NOAA Fisheries Assistant Administrator Coit today asking that the proposal –formally known as Amendment 10 to the Coral, Coral Reefs, and Hard Bottom Fishery Management Plan—be denied. The letter concludes, “We have only one chance to protect this one-of-a-kind ecosystem.  NOAA got it right in protecting the Oculina HAPC from harmful trawling practices decades ago.  NOAA should make the right decision and uphold the progress made over the last 40 years to protect the Oculina Banks.”

Professor John Reed of Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute/Florida Atlantic University speaking on his own behalf said, “As a marine scientist with 45 years of experience studying the deep-water Oculina coral reefs and associated ecosystem, it is important to understand that they occur nowhere else on earth. NOAA and the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council should be doing everything possible to protect them.  It’s a travesty that the proposed Amendment 1o would open a portion of the Oculina Habitat Area of Particular Concern (OHAPC) to shrimp trawlers that have been banned from trawling there since 1984. We have to protect this coral ecosystem f0r future generations. Destructive bottom trawls in marine protected areas of any kind should not be allowed.”

Dr. Lance Morgan, President of Marine Conservation Institute, said, “At a time the Biden-Harris administration is trying to expand protected areas under its visionary America the Beautiful program, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is reviewing a proposal that would destroy the last 10% of the world’s only deep-sea Oculina coral reef, the very first protected deep sea coral area in the US. He continued, “The resumption of bottom trawling there would result in a coral reef rubble wasteland and a tragic loss of the unique ivory-tree coral habitat. The proposal is nonsensical since it would benefit fewer than three fishermen in some years. Why would an agency that protected this place in 1984 be thinking about allowing its destruction in this day and age when our ocean is under attack in so many different ways?”

Shari Anker, President of the Conservation Alliance of St. Lucie County, said “For decades we’ve been watching our local land, waters and oceans decline from actions that governments take or allow, whether it’s putting highways through remarkable wetlands or standing by as parts of the Indian River Lagoon slowly die. The Conservation Alliance fights to protect parks and special places in our County. We ask NOAA to do the right thing and protect the precious Oculina corals off our shores from being crushed by trawler nets and smothered by sediment.”

###

Press Background 

• Oculina Bank NGO Sign-On Letter
• Oculina Factsheet [pdf]
• NOAA Evaluation of Amendment 10
• Maps and Photos

About Marine Conservation Institute

Marine Conservation Institute, founded in 1996, works in the U.S. and globally to seek strong protection for at least 30% of the ocean by 2030—for us and future generations. Our focus on protecting the ocean’s most important places follows several lines of work: identifying and advocating for strong marine protected areas; improving laws and other tools to better conserve marine biodiversity; catalyzing effective conservation by recognizing and elevating the best marine protected areas as Blue Parks and Blue Sparks; and accurately reporting on conservation metrics with our Marine Protection Atlas (MPAtlas.org).

marine-conservation.org

The post World’s First Deep-Water Coral Marine Protected Area Established in 1984 Off Florida Coast Now Facing Threat appeared first on Marine Conservation Institute.

Download the Report:

• SeaStates G20 2018 Executive Summary
• SeaStates G20 2018 Full Report

More details along with the complete series of SeaStates reports created by Marine Conservation Institute available at https://marine-conservation.org/seastates/ and https://marine-conservation.org/seastates/g20/2018/

Following the annual World Economic Forum at Davos, January 22-25, our staff at the Marine Protection Atlas released a new report on how well nations are protecting our ocean. The SeaStates G20 Report ranks just how well the world’s largest economies are doing at establishing highly protected MPAs.

The G20 member countries are the most financially able countries in the world; collectively their economies account for approximately 85% of the gross world product and 80% of world trade. Yet, with a few exceptions, their commitment to protecting their coastal waters is lacking, and capacity is clearly not the issue. With looming deadlines by 2020 from the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) calling on countries to meet and exceed targets of 10% of marine areas to be conserved through effectively managed, ecologically representative and well-connected systems of protected areas by 2020, the rest of the world is surely looking at the conservation performance of wealthy G20 countries. How do the countries with our world’s nineteen largest economies in addition to the EU compare as leaders in marine conservation and have they kept their standing promises to protect our oceans? They have the means, are they doing their part?

Oceans are essential to human survival and prosperity, yet our activities are pushing many critical marine species toward extinction. While marine protected areas (MPAs) are an effective tool for conserving intact ocean ecosystems and biodiversity in place, not all MPAs are created equal. Unlike so-called “paper parks,” only strongly protected sites, such as no-take marine reserves where extractive activities are prohibited, consistently deliver the conservation benefits that marine life need to thrive. Such reserves can increase the abundance and diversity of marine life exported to surrounding areas, both securing food resources for millions of people and preventing loss of species.

To this end, following the Malta Declaration at the Our Ocean conference in 2017 (for more information see https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/pristine-seas/malta-declaration/), an international coalition of marine scientists, conservationists and political operatives have been urging the global conservation community to adopt a standardized framework for assessing the level of protection afforded by MPAs, particularly from fully and strongly protected reserves. The group also calls upon the world to look beyond minimal protection targets and focus our attention on the need for a more robust network of strongly protected reserves across all marine ecosystems.

We carefully combed through the marine protected areas of the 19 G20 countries and of the combined European Union* ocean estate excluding associated Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs) using the Marine Protection Atlas (mpatlas.org), which includes source data from the October 2018 release of the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA, protectedplanet.net). Within the outer limits of their Exclusive Economic Zones, we assessed each
country’s inventory of designated marine protected areas, which includes both fully implemented sites in effect on the water and sites legally designated but pending implementation, with particular attention to strongly protected marine reserves.

Of the 19 G20 countries, only 6 have protected more than 1% of their oceans in strongly protected reserves. The United Kingdom (UK) and United States (US) lead the pack of front runners, with a full 23.3% and 23.1% of their respective marine estates fully protected. With a comprehensive marine park network coming into force this past July 2018 after six years of limbo, Australia ranks in third place with 9.2% of its entire marine estate within no-take reserves. In fourth place, Mexico has strongly protected about 4.7% of its marine area with 21.9% falling within all forms of marine protected areas.  Brazil follows behind with 3.3% of its ocean in strong reserves, with a significant contribution from no-take zones within the two new massive Environmental Protection Areas of Sao Pedro e Sao Paulo and Trinidade e Martim Vaz. In sixth place, France strongly protects about 1.5% of its vast marine estate. The remaining G20 group members have fully protected less than 1% of their oceans, including the whole European Union* with a minuscule 0.02% safeguarded within strongly protected reserves.

A concerning trend, the designation of large, remote areas makes up the entirety of the strong marine protection for the leading G20 countries (Figure 3). For example, the United Kingdom has only a handful of small no-take areas in surrounding waters, with the vast majority of their no-take area occurring in overseas territories. In fact, the UK, US, France, Brazil, and South Africa all have the greater part of their no-take reserves in remote waters far from centers of population. With most strongly protecting less than 1% of their heavily used home waters, these countries will need to improve protection there in order to ensure adequate protections across all ecosystems and habitats. Removing remote areas from the analysis, the top four countries for strongly protected marine areas in order are Australia, Mexico, Brazil, and Indonesia.

There are rays of hope as many countries have recommitted to meeting conservation targets. South Africa just announced in late October 2018 that they will be designating 20 new MPAs in 2019, bringing protection to more than 5% of their marine estate.

The post Calling for Greater Leadership from G20 Countries for Strong and Lasting Protection of the World’s Oceans appeared first on Marine Conservation Institute.

This a quarterly update from the Marine Protection Atlas (mpatlas.org) team. Be sure to visit mpatlas.org for the latest information and analyses on marine protected area coverage worldwide.

Adelie penguin jumping onto ice. Photo: John Weller

It’s a good day to be a krill, penguin, seal, toothfish, or an orca. They have been waiting a whole year for the Ross Sea Protected Area to come into effect since it was officially designated by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR). Despite the many proposals from New Zealand and the US and failed votes leading back to 2012, that doesn’t stop the Ross Sea Protected Area from being anything but a big deal. Indeed, it is the largest marine protected area (MPA) in the world, protecting around 1.55 million km² (600,000 mi²) of the Southern Ocean. And 72% of the protected area is managed as no-take marine reserves that prohibit fishing and other extraction or destruction of marine life, providing the strongest and most effective protection to marine biodiversity over more area of ocean habitat than any other reserve worldwide.

Ross Sea Protected Area. Source: Antarctic Ocean Alliance, Nature

The figure below shows today’s change in marine protection from November to December 2017 as the Ross Sea Protected Area moves from a “pending” into full effect MPA.

Change in global marine protection in effect December 2017.

The Ross Sea Protected Area isn’t the only noteworthy recent MPA announcement. A number of countries took big steps in marine protected area designation this year at the International Marine Protected Area Congress (IMPAC4) in Chile and the Our Ocean meeting in Malta. Chile, a global leader in protecting its country’s offshore waters, has pledged to increase its protected marine estate to 1.6 million km², including the two no-take marine parks at the Juan Fernandéz archipelago and at Cabo de Hornos (Cape Horn) and the Diego Ramirez Islands coming into effect soon. This increase also includes the almost 600,000 km² Rapa Nui Rahui protected area just voted in by referendum of the people of Eastern Island (Rapa Nui). The Easter Islanders and the Chilean government will be working out the area’s zoning and management plans over the next several years.

Revillagigedo Islands. Photo: Presidencia de la República Mexicana

At Our Ocean, the South Pacific island nation of Niue announced a 127,000 km² marine reserve in its waters to be implemented early next year. At the same meeting, Mexico also announced plans to convert the Archipiélago de Revillagigedo Biosphere Reserve, 390 kilometers southwest of Baja California, into a National Park, expanding it to over 148,000 km². Just last week, their government announced that the new regulations are in effect and enforced by the Mexican navy, making this remote cluster of islands teeming with marine life the largest strongly protected marine reserve in the Eastern Pacific.

Spiny lobsters around the Revillagigedo Islands. Photo: Octavio Aburto

The Marine Protection Atlas (mpatlas.org) has a special focus on classifying and recognizing strongly protected reserves as distinct from marine protected areas that allow various destructive or extractive human uses. We also strive to show which protected areas are proposed or promised, which are legally designated but pending implementation – a process that may take many years – and which sites are in force on the water where it actually matters to marine life.

We all have our work cut out for us through 2020 and beyond, as we strive to serve on behalf of ocean ecosystems with vibrant and diverse marine life, coastal communities, global society and for future generations. As countries race to meet the 10% by 2020 goals, it is more important than ever to have the Marine Protection Atlas (mpatlas.org) critically interpret “on the water” protection and incentivize countries to create meaningful and effective designations, not just “paper parks.”

As the year comes to a close, please consider making a donation to Marine Conservation Institute. Your support will:

• allow the Marine Protection Atlas to provide essential data and analyses to the conservation community,
• enable our Global Ocean Refuge System initiative to honor and recognize the best protected places in the sea and provide guidelines to areas to improve the strength and quality of their regulations,
• and support our advocacy for effective protection of the most important and threatened ocean places.

Make a Donation Now

The post Year End Bonus: Marine Biodiversity Boosted by Massive Conservation Areas appeared first on Marine Conservation Institute.

We are packing up our bags, computers, maps, and brochures and flying to Chile.

No, we are not fleeing the current political regime in the U.S. We are going to the beachside city of La Serena-Coquimbo for the 4^th International Congress of Marine Protected Areas (IMPAC4). Every four years, the global conservation community gathers at IMPAC to share ideas and experiences with other conservation scientists, policymakers, managers and practitioners. By talking to, working with, and learning from each other during the week of September 4th through 8th, we can all do a better job of safeguarding biodiversity in the sea and maintaining other aspects of natural and cultural marine heritage around our shared ocean. The IMPAC conference is focused solely on helping people achieve lasting marine protection around the globe through equitable and effective means.

Marine Conservation Institute staff are energized and ready to engage with our peers. Will you be there, too? Then come join us at our interactive exhibition space in the convention center lobby!

The Global Ocean Refuge System and MPAtlas.org will be on exhibit at the IMPAC4 Convention Center lobby.

You can’t miss us right in front of the ballrooms and meeting rooms. Come try our MPAtlas.org interactive map of marine protected areas and other conservation tools on a giant screen. Command an immersive Liquid Galaxy display and fly through underwater scenes from around the world or explore information on top of the 3D globe. Step up to our Ocean Voices media booth and share your hopes and vision for the ocean and its marine life with the world. Engage with our live reporting throughout the event and join us for happy hour recaps on conference activities and important announcements and developments. We might even have some fun team trivia events with prizes to give away! And, best of all, don’t miss the ceremony where we will inaugurate the Global Ocean Refuge System (GLORES) by announcing the first marine protected areas to be awarded Global Ocean Refuge status. Please check the GLORES website the week before IMPAC4 for the timing of the announcement and celebration.

If you can’t be at the congress in person, we’ve got you covered. We are collaborating with MPA News and OpenChannels.org to bring live reporting from the floor of the exhibit halls, ballrooms and meetings to your social media streams and your desktop. Follow us on Twitter at @savingoceans, watch MPAtlas.org for major marine protected area announcements and statistics, and stay tuned for more blog posts summarizing key activities at IMPAC4.

See you in La Serena!

For more information about IMPAC4, visit http://impac4.org.

The Global Ocean Refuge System

The Global Ocean Refuge System (GLORES) is a bold and innovative strategy to safeguard marine biodiversity around the world by accelerating the rate of marine protected area (MPA) implementation and improving their quality. GLORES uses up-to-date science to set high standards for MPAs. The result of the Global Ocean Refuge System will be a world-wide network of refuges safeguarding marine wildlife. MPAs that meet GLORES’ science-based standards receive GLORES awards. Governments will implement MPAs to meet GLORES standards because Global Ocean Refuges will attract tourists, local support, and investors, while bringing a sense of pride to political leaders, managers, and communities. The strategic framework that GLORES creates will support MPA efforts around the world and complement the advocacy of conservation groups working to implement MPAs.

The Marine Protection Atlas

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are an important tool for recovering, revitalizing and sustaining marine ecosystems. Yet, despite current efforts to safeguard the ocean, only 3% is secured globally within protected areas implemented as of early 2017. Only about 1.6% of the ocean is actively designated as no-take reserves — the highest conservation standard for MPAs — largely due to recent very large and remote MPA designations. The Convention on Biological Diversity Aichi Target 11, UN Sustainable Development Goal 14 and other agreements and regional challenges call for 10% or more of the ocean’s ecosystems in MPAs by 2020. Yet many scientists and conservation experts advocate for a more rigorous goal of 30% of the ocean in strongly protected reserves in order to adequately protect marine biodiversity in place.

Using existing data from official and unofficial protected area inventories, along with staff research and data collected from local sources and non-governmental partners, MPAtlas.org puts forward the world’s most complete map and interactive database focused solely on MPAs. Showing progress towards conservation targets, MPAtlas.org helps conservation advocates, scientists, policymakers, industry and the public see how well governments are doing to protect oceans and meet commitments. It closely tracks MPA designation campaigns, documenting grassroots efforts and high-level government pledges to create new or strengthen existing protected areas. MPAtlas.org enables the conservation community and global citizens to form a nuanced view of promises and real actions towards meeting conservation targets. At IMPAC4, we will showcase the tool’s utility and engage experts to contribute their conservation stories and knowledge of MPAs.

The post How to Protect the Living Ocean? appeared first on Marine Conservation Institute.

How much of the world’s ocean have humans safeguarded within reserves, refuges and parks to protect marine biodiversity? 

It is tricky to provide a single clear answer to this question for a number of reasons. It’s trickier still to say which of them are effective at conservation because any number of planning, management and enforcement obstacles can negate potential protection “in the water” where it counts most.

For better or worse, the conservation community and resource management authorities frequently measure their progress by metrics of the number and geographic coverage of marine protected areas (MPAs). Indeed, a number of international agreements, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity’s 2011 Aichi Biodiversity Targets set a bar for critical conservation at 10% coverage by marine protected areas of the ocean within national jurisdictions and within biogeographic regions. Several scientific analyses, however, have indicated that having 20-30% of marine areas in reserves is the minimum necessary to safeguard marine life. Despite such warnings, we are now watching a very slow race to achieve 10% of marine areas in some form of protected zone (at the current rate, this might take us until 2100).

In this post, we’ll step through how these numbers play out as of May 2014 and look ahead to the hard work still left to do. At the 3^rd International Marine Protected Areas Congress (IMPAC3) meeting in France in October 2013, the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) and UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC) announced what they are calling “The Official MPA Map” at ProtectPlanetOcean.org based on the latest World Database of Protected Areas (WDPA).

This analysis suggests that 2.8% of the total ocean is protected with about 10% of territorial seas (0–12 nautical miles), 5% of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) (12-200 nautical miles), and 0.14% of the High Seas (beyond 200 nautical miles) within marine protected areas. This serves as a good upper-limit for the total amount of global marine protected area coverage. However, the actual amount of coverage by parks that have permanent protection is a little less, and the coverage of fully no-take areas and other strongly protected and well-enforced areas is even less still.

Over at MPAtlas, we’ve taken the WDPA data as a starting point and examined certain regions in depth, replacing WDPA records with national or regional databases that are more up-to-date or provide greater detail (e.g., using the NOAA MPA Center inventory for US sites) and performing additional corrections based on original research. In order to clarify the definition of marine protected areas in contrast to other marine managed areas, the IUCN uses the following:

A clearly defined geographical space, recognized, dedicated, and managed through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values. 

while NOAA’s MPA Center defines marine protected areas as thus:

Any area of the marine environment that has been reserved by federal, state, territorial, tribal, or local laws or regulations to provide lasting protection for part or all of the natural and cultural resources therein.

Both definitions clearly indicate the importance of permanence and place-based management. For this reason, in our analysis at MPAtlas we have pulled out a number of fisheries management zones that are temporary closures (e.g., don’t meet the promise of permanence) or broad regional management zones without clear place-based affinity and management (e.g., a single gear closure along the entire US East Coast does not equal a marine protected area in our analysis). With a pass through the database, we have removed about 2% of the global marine area covered by these types of non-marine-protected-area, fisheries management areas that are not also covered by other protected areas.

Total MPA (orange) and no-take reserve (green) coverage contributing towards the 10% minimum target.

After filtering out such sites, we are left with approximately 1.8% of the world’s ocean contained within site-managed marine protected areas. Another difference between this number from MPAtlas and that from “The Official MPA Map” is that the 2012 Australian Commonwealth Marine Reserves are not included in our analysis. These areas are currently under government review and public consultation. If reinstated, they would add about 0.66% of global marine protected area and 0.24% to global no-take reserve coverage.

Global marine protected area coverage, highlighting the largest protected areas.

When considering only the known no-take marine reserves and no-take zones within zoned multiple-use marine protected areas, we see that only 0.6% of the ocean is under this strongest form of marine protection. The majority of no-take protection is comprised by only a handful of very large and remote marine protected areas, with the Chagos Marine Protected Area being that largest at 640,000 km².

While Kiribati’s Phoenix Islands Protected Area has been only 3% no-take since its designation, the government has just announced a decision to phase out all commercial fishing within the entire area. This would represent a huge increase in global no-take area when this decision goes into effect.

No-take reserve size class distribution.

Projections of global marine protected area coverage. Current rates are too slow to avert drastic changes to global systems (modified from Wood et al. 2008 and Toonen et al. 2013).

Whether we use a metric of MPAtlas’ 1.8% or ProtectPlanetOcean’s 2.8%, the message is the same: we have a long way to go as a global community to adequately protect vulnerable places and species in the sea.

At Marine Conservation Institute we are trying to change the slow pace of conservation in the ocean. Our Global Ocean Refuge System (GLORES) initiative is designed to catalyze strong protection for at least 20% of the ecosystems in each marine biogeographic region of the world’s oceans. By establishing consistent criteria for determining the most important locations and protection levels needed to save species and their habitats from harm, GLORES will provide standards that the world can use to evaluate the effectiveness of marine protected areas.

The post How Much of Our Ocean Is Protected? appeared first on Marine Conservation Institute.