"That's a pretty good time frame to start doing bigger and more important things," he said. Morgan said that, if all goes to plan, the process should wrap up in 2018, giving countries about 12 years to establish conservation zones before the 2030 deadline. create a new agency just for Marine Protected Areas? last year launched a diplomatic process to resolve such thorny questions as: Who can propose a protected area in the high seas? Who is responsible for managing them, and who would foot the bill? Should the U.N. China's controversial artificial islands in the South China Sea bolster its military presence in the region.īut governments' reluctance to establish Marine Protected Areas isn't the biggest challenge to actually achieving the 30 percent by 2030 target.Ī Green Sea Turtle in the U.S.-affiliated Pacific Ocean.
New Zealand's offshore oil and gas fields contribute billions of dollars to its economy and tax income. Japan, for instance, exports around 1.4 trillion yen ($11.6 billion) worth of seafood each year. Handling the high seasĬountries have a host of economic and strategic reasons for not wanting to rope off their sovereign waters. "We're just way out of scale with those targets right now," he said. "What that says is, you have to protect a very significant area of ocean in order to contribute meaningfully to conservation and fisheries management objectives," Roberts told Mashable. The average value of those studies was 37 percent of oceans, the researchers said in an April paper published in the journal Conservation Letters. Roberts and his colleagues reviewed 144 studies to determine whether the 10-percent target was enough to protect global fish populations and keep ecosystems healthy.
"We are entirely unrealistic to think that nature can cope with the protection of 10 percent the seas," Roberts, the marine conservation professor, told Mashable. Proponents of stronger protection measures say the 10-percent target was largely based on politics: It sounded ambitious enough for countries to get behind, but wasn't actually rooted in science. They later revised the deadline to 2020 after it was clear the world would miss its original goal. 26, Obama quadrupled the size of the monument to nearly 583,000 square miles, making it the largest protected area of any kind - marine or terrestrial - in the world.Ĭountries previously set a target to protect 10 percent of oceans by 2012 during the United Nations' Convention on Biological Diversity. President Barack Obama aboard, over the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in the Pacific Ocean, Sept.
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