Marine Protected Areas
Advancing the establishment of new marine protected areas, particularly in light of the Global Biodiversity Framework’s 30×30 target and the High Seas Treaty (BBNJ Agreement)
Marine Protected Areas are among the most important legal tools for marine conservation. Under the Convention on Biological Diversity, a protected area is an area that is designated, regulated and managed to achieve specific conservation objectives. Yet many MPAs remain paper parks. As States work towards the global 30x30 target, the risk is that protection is measured mainly by surface coverage, rather than by whether harmful activities are actually restricted, managed and enforced.
Marine Protected Areas
While around 10% of the world’s Ocean is now designated as protected, independent assessments suggest that only a much smaller share is effectively managed with high or full protection. This gap between designation and effective protection is one of the central challenges of Ocean governance. MPAs must not become numerical achievements on paper. They must deliver real protection for marine ecosystems, species and the communities who depend on them.
Industrial fleets quickly learn where enforcement is weak. They actively target the borders and interiors of unmonitored MPAs because fish populations are slightly denser there, rapidly wiping out years of natural growth.
MPAs are meant to act as evolutionary safe havens. When poaching goes unchecked, larger breeding adults are selectively removed, driving down the genetic health and resilience of the remaining population.
Properly enforced MPAs eventually create a "spillover effect," where recovering fish stocks migrate into neighboring, legal fishing zones. When an MPA is not enforced, this spillover never happens, starving local fishers of expected long-term economic gains.
Setting up an MPA requires millions of dollars in scientific research, legal drafting, and public forums. Failing to enforce the area makes these massive financial investments completely useless.
What we're doing
Our MPA work focuses on turning designation into effective protection. We represent BUND in legal proceedings challenging the continued authorisation of bottom trawling in the German part of the Doggerbank, a European Natura 2000 Marine Protected Area. The case seeks to ensure that authorities cannot permit destructive activities in protected areas without first carrying out the assessments required under EU nature protection law. Beyond this litigation, we are developing legal strategies at national, regional and international levels to strengthen the establishment, enforcement and effectiveness of MPAs and other area-based protection measures. This includes exploring how restrictions on harmful activities, such as bottom trawling, can contribute to meaningful protection of ecologically important marine areas, including where formal MPA designation is absent, delayed or ineffective. We are also working on legal avenues to uphold and enforce marine protection in the Southern Ocean, where Antarctic MPAs remain blocked despite urgent ecological need. Across this work, our aim is to move MPAs from political commitments and paper parks towards enforceable conservation outcomes.
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Support Our Work
The Ocean needs more than awareness. It needs accountability. Your support helps advance strategic legal action, achieve strengthen Ocean Rights and support Ocean-dependent and Indigenous communities working to protect the ecosystems they know best. Together, we can help turn legal obligation into lasting Ocean protection.
