Publication Name
Nature
Author(s)
Daniel Cressey
Former US President George W. Bush did not garner much applause from environmentalists during his eight years in the White House, but on 15 June 2006, he gave them something to cheer about. Bush signed an order to create the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in Hawaii, then the world's largest ocean conservation area. Spanning about 360,000 square kilometres of the Pacific Ocean, the reserve is designed to safeguard 7,000 marine species including the rare Hawaiian monk seal (Monachus schauinslandi), hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata) and leatherback turtles (Dermochelys coriacea) and nearly two dozen other animals on the US endangered species list. It also started a race between other nations to follow suit with giant reserves of their own.
Since then, Australia, the United Kingdom and the Pacific nation of Kiribati have created still larger ocean conservation zones. And nations are discussing plans to make other huge reserves that will encompass much of the Southern Ocean and the Sargasso Sea. Worldwide, about 4 million square kilometres have now been set aside in marine protected areas (MPAs).
Despite that rapid expansion, many of the MPAs fall well short of the grand plans that governments once trumpeted to protect the world's oceans and the species that live in them. The 2002 Convention on Biological Diversity called on the world to protect 10% of the oceans by 2012, but the MPAs created so far cover little more than 1%.
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One of the forces driving the expansion of larger MPAs has been the Global Oceans Legacy programme of the Pew Environment Group in Washington DC. In the mid-2000s, Pew identified a handful of sites as suitable for mega-MPAs because they had relatively low economic value and were owned by countries that had a history of conservation and the ability to enforce protections.
The United States has established MPAs in two of these areas: the Papahānaumokuākea protected zone and one in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific. In late November, Australia proposed plans for a 990,000-square-kilometre reserve in the Coral Sea off the country's northeast coast. Another of the sites highlighted by Pew was New Zealand's Kermadec Islands, where protections are currently in place for the sea floor, and conservationists would like to extend them to the entire water column.
Jay Nelson, director of the global ocean legacy programme at Pew, sees the Papahānaumokuākea MPA as the marine equivalent of Yellowstone National Park, the first big parcel of land to be set aside as a reserve. The creation of that park in 1872, he says, set off a chain reaction, prompting other countries to establish large parks of their own. “That had a similar effect to what Papahānaumokuākea has had in the oceans.”
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Looking forward, researchers want to investigate how best to monitor and manage the increasing numbers of MPAs. As they assess the effectiveness of reserves, scientists sometimes find surprises, such as the fate of the monk seals in Hawaii's Papahānaumokuākea MPA. The seal population has increased outside the protected region but declined inside it, perhaps because sharks have thrived there4. Ashley McCrea Strub, a postdoctoral fellow working with Pauly's lab, says that there are very few data on the cost effectiveness of reserves and it will be vital to fill that gap. “That's really the future of where we need to go,” she says. “That's an enormously important question.”
Some scientists have argued for doing more studies on MPAs before moving forward with major plans for new ones. But Possingham says the benefits in most cases are clear enough. “If you wait till you have perfect data,” he says, “then you'll be waiting forever.”
Read the full article, Ocean Conservation: Uncertain Sanctuary on the Nature website
