Publication Name
Yale Environment 360
Author(s)
Bruce Barcott
This week the National Marine Protected Areas Center, a tiny division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), was scheduled to release an eight-page fact sheet titled “Marine Reserves in the United States.” Lauren Wenzel, the center’s director, was kind enough to send me an advance copy.
It’s a telling document. The brief report confirms what ocean advocates have been saying for years: Far too little of America’s ocean areas are protected. A little more than 3 percent of U.S. territorial waters — 381,969 square kilometers — are protected at the highest level as marine reserves. But 95 percent of that area is contained in a single reserve, the 363,680-square-kilometer Papahānaumokuākea National Monument (formerly known as the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands National Monument) created by President George W. Bush in 2006. Without Papahānaumokuākea, marine reserves make up only one-tenth of 1 percent of U.S. waters.
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Most marine reserves around the world were originally created small, as parts of existing national parks, or to protect specific areas like breeding grounds against the ravages of overfishing. But in the last few years a number of ocean advocates have championed a new strategy: Go big.
Pew’s Global Oceans Legacy project, for example, has been working for the creation of six massive marine reserves that would vastly increase the area of ocean under marine reserve-level protection. Three of Oceans Legacy’s targeted areas—in the Northern Hawaiian Islands, the Marianas Trench region, and the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean—have already been placed under various levels of protection. Three more are under consideration. A proposed 630,000-square-kilometer reserve would protect the waters around New Zealand’s remote Kermadec Islands. In Australia, ocean advocates are working to create a 900,000-square-kilometer marine reserve in the Coral Sea. The boldest proposal would put a whopping 5 million square kilometers under protection in the biologically rich Sargasso Sea, near Bermuda.
Read the full article, The Unfulfilled Promise of the World’s Marine Protected Areas, on the Yale Environment 360 website.
