This survey is gathering MPA practitioners’ questions on three of the biggest challenges facing the field: effectiveness, financing, and climate change and is the first part of a project by OCTO, UNEP, the University of Queensland, and partners to build practical, evidence-based, ‘how-to’ answers
In 2015, palau, a nation of more than 300 coral and volcanic islands in the western Pacific Ocean, expanded on decades of marine conservation to create a 193,000-square-mile protected area encompassing an extraordinary 80% of its ocean waters.
East Maui residents are proposing the creation of a protected fishing area for Kipahulu to help regulate harvesting practices and increased foot traffic and to protect depleting resources that once fully sustained nearby communities.
Funding the establishment of Marine Protection Areas (MPAs) – thus protecting them from activity by bottom-trawling vessels – could form an innovative new type of carbon credit scheme.
Marine protected areas (MPAs) are a primary tool for the stewardship, conservation, and restoration of marine ecosystems, yet 69% of global MPAs are only partially protected (i.e., are open to some form of fishing). Although fully protected areas have well-documented outcomes, including increased fish diversity and biomass, the effectiveness of partially protected areas is contested.
Over the last decades scientists have discovered that seagrass meadows, tidal marshes, and mangroves – “blue carbon” ecosystems – are among the most intensive carbon sinks in the biosphere. By sequestering and storing significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and ocean, blue carbon ecosystems help mitigate climate change. But conversion and degradation of these ecosystems can also release billions of tons of CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the ocean and atmosphere and contribute to global warming.
Protecting areas of ocean from destructive human activity could help prevent climate change, protect biodiversity, and at the same time increase the catch of fish, according to the most comprehensive analysis of its kind.
Compared to fully safeguarded marine protected areas, partially protected areas have little benefit for marine life or people’s enjoyment...an in-depth study of MPAs along Australia’s southern coast shows that these partially protected reserves are largely ineffective—both for protecting biodiver
The campaign to protect 30 percent of the world’s oceans by 2030, supported by more than 70 nations, is known mostly for soaring ambition and scant achievement so far. Just 7 percent of the seas are protected and only 2.7 percent are highly protected.
The concept of MPA governance refers to the mix of approaches used at each MPA to steer user behavior. This steering is done through some combination of state control (‘top-down’), community-based approaches (‘bottom-up’), and market forces.