Remote coral atolls in the Caribbean. Habitat for threatened sharks and rays around a Tanzanian island in the Indian Ocean. And 900,000 square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean around French Polynesia.
These are some of the millions of acres of water now set aside as part of an international goal to protect 30 percent of the ocean by 2030. More than 20 new marine protected areas were announced at the third United Nations Ocean Conference, which ended on Friday in France.
Countries and territories pledging new areas included Chile; Colombia; French Polynesia; Portugal; Samoa; Sao Tome and Principe; the Solomon Islands; Tanzania; and Vanuatu.
“Protecting the ocean is beginning to become fashionable,” said Sylvia Earle, a marine biologist and oceanographer who served as chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the 1990s, at an event celebrating a network of protected areas around the Azores.
The new designations come at a time when the United States, which sent only two observers to the conference, has moved to reopen the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument to commercial fishing. The country is also seeking to unilaterally authorize mining of the seafloor in international waters.
France, which hosted the conference with Costa Rica, pushed for a moratorium on deep sea mining, with four new countries pledging their support this week, bringing the total to 37 countries.
Less than 3 percent of the ocean is currently fully protected from “extractive” activities like commercial fishing and mining, according to the Marine Protection Atlas.
Peter Thomson, the United Nations secretary general’s special envoy for the ocean, acknowledged at the Azores event that reaching 30 percent by the 2030 deadline may not happen. But, he said, “It’s not a mythical thing that will never happen.”
In order to reach the goal, the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement, also known as the High Seas Treaty, needs to be enforced with at least 60 countries ratifying it. At the conference, 19 new countries ratified the treaty, bringing the total to 50 individual countries plus the European Union. Once active, the treaty would provide a pathway toward protecting stretches of the ocean beyond individual countries’ borders.
And in coastal waters within those borders, much remains to be done. A study published in May found that the average marine protected area today is about 10 square kilometers, meaning about 188,000 more areas of that size are needed — or 85 new marine protected areas a day.
These numbers are “super daunting,” said the report’s lead author Kristin Rechberger, who is chief executive of the conservation organization Dynamic Planet. She wants countries to break through the challenge by decentralizing marine protection and allowing coastal communities to create their own small protected areas at a faster pace.
A separate report published last week found that countries need to raise $15.8 billion a year in order to protect 30 percent of the ocean. Currently about $1.2 billion a year goes toward ocean protection globally.
Questions also remain about how meaningful existing protections are.
Activists have been pushing the French government to announce a ban on bottom trawling in its marine protected areas. President Emmanuel Macron announced that France would place 4 percent of its mainland waters under “strong protection,” limiting bottom trawling, a fishing process that drags nets along the seafloor. This falls short of an existing European Union goal of placing 10 percent of its waters under “strict protection,” without commercial fishing of any kind.
“Allowing destructive bottom trawling in most of France’s so-called ‘protected’ areas makes a mockery of ocean protection,” said Alexandra Cousteau, senior adviser to Oceana and granddaughter of the ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau, in a written statement. “It’s like building a fence around a forest and then bulldozing it anyway.”
Even where protections from commercial fishing exist around the world, enforcement is often lacking.
Zafer Kizilkaya, president of the Mediterranean Conservation Society, has worked with local fishing communities to create and patrol a marine protected area at Gokova Bay in Turkey, allowing endangered monk seals to return. Community members — including former fishers — serve as marine rangers, reporting illegal commercial fishing to the Turkish Coast Guard, which follows up with fines.
Mr. Kizilkaya is not seeking greater percentages of protected marine areas at this point, but rather “serious enforcement and management,” he said. “That will make a huge difference.”
The United States did not send an official delegation to the conference. Two representatives from the the administration’s Environmental Advisory Task Force, including Ed Russo, the chairman, attended as what the State Department called “government observers.”
The day before the conference began, Mr. Russo wrote an opinion piece in Time magazine with Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce and owner of Time, outlining ideas for a “focused, global effort to restore coral reefs.”
“We believe that addressing coral-reef health is a smart place to focus — not because it is the only crisis,” they wrote, “but because it offers a clear, actionable, achievable goal that can unite governments and ocean advocates.”
Mr. Russo and Mr. Benioff did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Russo is chief executive of RussKap Water, president of the Florida Keys Environmental Coalition and a board member of Reef Relief.
Mr. Benioff, who during the first Trump administration raised Republican support for an initiative to plant a trillion trees, has funded a center for marine conservation called the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Salesforce was a major sponsor of the U.N. ocean conference’s publicly accessible exhibits.
John Kerry, the former special presidential envoy for climate under President Biden, said he didn’t know what role the United States would play in ocean protection now.
“We have an amazing conglomeration of countries that have come together to improve the marine protected areas,” Mr. Kerry said. The announcements this week, however, are “just building blocks,” he said. “We are not moving fast enough or at scale.”
Daphné Anglès contributed reporting.
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