United Kingdom: The global goal of converting 30 percent of the ocean into protected areas by 2030 is looking increasingly fragile. Conservationists say little progress has been made on the goal and the United States is falling behind.

“Less than 10 percent of the ocean is designated as marine protected areas (MPAs) and only 2.7 percent is fully or highly protected. In this situation, achieving the 30 percent goal will be difficult,” said Lance Morgan, head of the Marine Conservation Institute in Seattle, Washington. The institute maps MPAs for an online atlas that updates the steps to meet the 30 percent goal under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, signed by 193 countries in 2022.

The ambition is at risk because “we are seeing countries like the United States abandon decades of bipartisan efforts to protect areas in the Pacific.” He cited President Donald Trump’s April executive order, which authorized industrial-scale fishing in a large part of an MPA in that ocean.

Currently, there are 16,516 declared MPAs in the world, covering just 8.4 percent of the ocean. But not all MPAs are created equal: some prohibit all fishing, while others have little or no rules about what activities are prohibited or permitted.

“Only about one-third of them have the right level of protection for fish,” says Joachim Claudet, an eco-environmental marine researcher at France’s CNRS.

“Marine protected areas were not really designed to protect biodiversity,” says Daniel Pauli, a professor of fisheries science at the University of British Columbia in Canada. “They were designed to increase fish catch.”

A proper MPA “exports fish from protected areas to non-protected areas, and that should be the main reason for creating marine protected areas – the fish need them,” he said.

When fish populations are released to reproduce and grow in protected areas, there is often a spillover effect, where fish numbers increase outside the areas, as several scientific journals have noted, especially around a no-fishing MPA in Hawaiian waters, the largest in the world.

A 2022 study published in the journal Science found that yellowfin tuna increased by 54 percent around that Hawaiian MPA, an area now threatened by Trump’s executive order, Pauley said.

Fishing bans

For such sanctuaries to be effective, they would need to prohibit fishing in all or at least some areas, Claudette said. But such restricted MPAs cover only 2.7 percent of the ocean and are almost always located in areas that are far from areas heavily impacted by human activity.

In Europe, for example, “90 percent of marine protected areas are still subject to bottom trawling,” says Alexandra Casto, a spokeswoman for the NGO Oceana. “It makes no sense ecologically.”

Pauli says that “bottom trawling in MPAs is like picking flowers with a bulldozer… they scratch the seabed.” Oceana says French MPAs are subject to intense bottom trawling, with 17,000 hours in 2024, and 20,600 hours in British waters. The NGO is calling for a ban on the technique, which involves dragging a heavy net along the seabed, which creates a disturbance.

A recent report by the WWF said that only two percent of European Union waters are covered by MPAs, some of which do not include any protection measures. Jacob Armstrong, head of oceans at WWF’s European office, said this was not enough to protect the health of the oceans. He said governments must match their words with action, otherwise these areas will become nothing more than symbolic marks on the map.