The Next Act in Ocean Conservation Must Focus on Results

For two decades, policymakers, scientists, and ocean advocates measured marine conservation progress largely by how much of the ocean was protected. Now many of them are asking an equally important question: whether those protections are delivering lasting benefits for nature and people.

As member governments of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) gather this month in Yerevan, Armenia, to assess progress toward global biodiversity targets, they should examine the breadth of ocean protection and consider what they can do to ensure that conservation measures—past and future—fulfil their promise.

Those targets, adopted by nearly 200 governments in 2022, included the pledge to conserve and effectively manage 30% of the ocean by 2030. Today, 10% of the ocean is under some form of protection, but that figure says little about whether those areas have the resources, governance, and local leadership to produce lasting results.

To be clear, scientists have evidence that ocean protections benefit people and nature, including making adjacent fisheries more productive, increasing the ocean’s resilience to climate change, and sustaining coastal habitat that serves as nursery grounds for an array of species and buffers coastal communities from storms. But designating a protected area is just one step; how these places are managed makes a huge difference in how effective they are.

For example, fully and highly protected areas—with sufficient monitoring and enforcement—produce larger gains for marine life and more productive fisheries than do partially protected ones. By the most recent tally, about 3.5% of the ocean lies inside highly or fully marine protected areas (MPAs) where rules are enforced and allow, at most, low-impact fishing. In some of these MPAs, communities that rely on those waters may keep fishing as long as that activity doesn’t negatively affect the area’s conservation goals.

Pew’s work on large marine reserves began in 2006, when less than 1% of the ocean was protected. Since then, Pew and its partners—including Pew Bertarelli Ocean Legacy, a partnership with philanthropist and ocean advocate Dona Bertarelli—have helped governments create many of the world’s fully and highly protected marine areas.

The lesson of that experience is that designation and implementation should be considered a package from the start. A designation cannot track a fishing vessel or put a patrol boat to sea. It is therefore incumbent upon governments—working with front-line communities and other partners—to finance and manage these areas in a way that maximizes their benefit.

Fortunately, examples abound for how to do this. The remote South Atlantic community of Tristan da Cunha chose to protect about 90% of its waters while maintaining a thriving and sustainable lobster fishery. The designation came with a management plan that made clear who was responsible for carrying it out, detailing training for local staff and specifics on ongoing financial and technical support. None of these pieces appear on a map, but every protected area designation needs them, and planning and development of those elements should start well before the conservation action is announced.

Countries with more populous shores and more-active fishing communities have also succeeded. Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Panama have cooperated since 2004 on stewardship of their shared Eastern Tropical Pacific corridor, a key migratory route for sharks, sea turtles, and whales.

It’s also crucial that protected area governance be equitable. That starts with governments recognizing the authority that Indigenous peoples and local communities already hold over their waters and putting them on equal footing from the start in planning, designing, and implementing protections. The CBD’s 2022 pledge recognizes Indigenous and traditional territories, though global databases are just starting to account for the protection these communities have provided for millennia.

In French Polynesia, for example, communities in the Austral and Marquesas islands spent years advocating for large marine protected areas rooted in traditional rāhui practices—voluntarily limiting fishing during certain periods to ensure long-term abundance—which has helped shape conservation proposals that reflect local cultural values, stewardship traditions, and priorities.

On financing, philanthropic organizations including Pew can sometimes help by, for example, starting deals that link long-term financing to a government’s conservation commitments. But philanthropy alone can’t close a global ocean conservation funding gap of billions of dollars a year. That work must be shared by governments, development banks, and private finance.

Today, the big opportunity for meaningful marine protection progress rests in the high seas, the nearly two-thirds of the ocean beyond any country’s jurisdiction. The United Nations High Seas Treaty, which entered into force in January, creates the first process for proposing protected areas in these waters. Its parties meet for the first time in January 2027 to begin determining how to consider proposals.

The designations and progress of the past 20 years were hard won. In Yerevan, governments should build on those gains by showing how MPAs will be managed, funded, and assessed. This work, along with new conservation commitments, will help ensure a thriving ocean that supports people and nature far into the future.

Tom Dillon is a senior vice president with The Pew Charitable Trusts, leading the organization’s work on conservation and environment initiatives around the world.