Biodiversité

On the second day of the UN Ocean Conference, two partnership dialogues took place on: managing, protecting, conserving, and restoring marine and coastal ecosystems; and minimizing and addressing ocean acidification. UNCTAD, FAO and UN Environment announced a voluntary commitment that aims to remove or reduce harmful fisheries subsidies, and additional commitments focused on phasing out single-use plastic.

Global areal protection targets have driven a dramatic expansion of the marine protected area (MPA) estate. We analyzed how cost‐effective global MPA expansion has been since the inception of the first global target (set in 1982) in achieving ecoregional representation. By comparing spatial patterns of MPA expansion against optimal MPA estates using the same expansion rates, we show the current MPA estate is both expensive and ineffective. Although the number of ecoregions represented tripled and 12.7% of national waters was protected, 61% of ecoregions and 81% of countries are not 10% protected. Only 10.3% of the national waters of the world would be sufficient to protect 10% of each ecoregion if MPA growth since 1982 strategically targeted underrepresented ecoregions.

Efforts to protect ocean ecosystems present hard choices for a world that depends on the consumption of seafood