Most marine protected areas fail to curb fishing: study
- Study of 861 MPAs using vessel tracking shows fishing activity rose in 58 percent of protected areas between 2012 and 2024.
- Most new MPAs offer low levels of protection and allow industrial fishing to continue inside boundaries despite conservation pledges.
- Fully protected reserves are rare and often sited where little fishing already occurred, questioning area coverage as a progress metric.
Fishing is increasing in most worldwide marine reserves in spite of conservation pledges, a study published Wednesday found.
Despite a rise in the number of marine protected areas (MPAs), they are failing to fend off the biggest threat to marine biodiversity, according to the research in the journal Science Advances.
“We didn’t expect to see such striking results,” said Joachim Claudet, a marine socioecology researcher at France’s CNRS and co-author of the study, which examined 861 protected zones around the world.
The number of MPAs has surged in recent years as countries work towards a goal, agreed by 196 nations in 2022, of protecting 30 percent of the world’s oceans by 2030.
Today, 17,227 MPAs cover nearly 10 percent of the oceans, according to the Protected Planet database.
But “we’ve noticed most of them have extremely low levels of protection and that industrial fishing is still taking place within them,” Claudet told AFP.
“Apart from the few fully protected zones — the highest level where fishing is banned — we found that fishing pressure has increased in most marine protected areas compared with before they were created.”
Researchers compared vessel-tracking data from Global Fishing Watch with maps of protected areas over the period from 2012 to 2024.
Overall, fishing activity rose in 58 percent of the protected areas studied, fell in 40 percent, and remained unchanged in two percent.
The study also found that the fully protected areas where fishing did decrease were often located in places where there had already been little industrial fishing.
“Globally, protected marine areas that regulate fishing tend to avoid areas where fishing is actually taking place,” Claudet said.
With the COP17 biodiversity summit due to take place in Armenia later this month, he questioned whether the share of oceans covered by protected areas should remain the main measure of progress.
“That tells us very little about how much these protected areas are actually helping to conserve biodiversity,” he said.
