Marine nature conservation must focus on fully-protected reserves, not resource management
Why protect nature?
There are many good reasons for people to conserve biodiversity. Biodiversity is what our lives and ecosystems depend upon, and it includes natural resources that must be used wisely so that they can continue being harvested in the future. Over thousands of years, people have developed a range of extensive and intensive methods to improve natural resource “management” in agriculture, forestry, hunting, fisheries and aquaculture; some more sustainable than others. Biodiversity must also be conserved in a natural state for philosophical, educational, scientific, aesthetic and ecological reasons. Sometimes these protected areas are called “wilderness”.
What is conservation?
International and scientific policies support the need for such wild areas, and that they should be representative of all habitats and species on Earth, and be sufficient in area to be naturally functioning ecosystems. However, conservation can easily conflate these forms of ‘conservation’, because there can be a continuum of human activities in areas that are ‘no-go’ to the public (e.g., private property, military training areas), ‘no-take’ (e.g., parks, reserves), actively managed (e.g., farmed, harvested), or unmanaged commons (e.g., most of the oceans).
What are MPA in practice?
In the ocean, the use of the term “Marine Protected Areas” (MPAs) is being applied to all kinds of areas, and over 90% do not even aim to protect nature in a natural condition. In effect, these MPAs aim to be more sustainably managed (e.g., restrictions on indiscriminate fishing methods and/or seabed trawling that destroys habitats). Yet, under the UN Convention on the Law of Sea and UN Sustainable Development Goals, countries have agreed to sustainably manage resources in all of the oceans. So if we follow current usage of the term, then all of the ocean should be an “MPA”. Within that measurement there needs to be areas set aside for nature to flourish without human interference. Scientific advice suggests this strongly protected area should be at least 30% of the ocean. Such an MPA concept is now the policy of several Pacific island nations where they have declared their seas MPAs. In addition, some international treaties and agreements protect the oceans in more specific ways, including from nuclear testing, pollution, hunting large whales and more. So precedents for binding, effective international agreements exist.
