If you pay attention to recent news and environmentalists, you’ve probably heard that there is an ever increasing push to have a larger number of conservation areas for wildlife protection. This is extremely important in a world where populations are exploding and humans are constantly transforming rural areas into urbanized zones. Globally there are 13 million hectares of deforestation occurring every year, with rare countries showing as much as a 28% increase of clear cutting. Although land protection is very important, it seems like less press time is given to the protection of marine habitats.
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In the last few year there has been a push for marine protected areas; however, a disturbing, 6 year study from Australia published in nature, shows that these marine protected areas or MPAs are not having as positive an effect as we might have hoped. With the total fish biomass having declined by two thirds in fished areas it’s extremely worrisome that fifty nine percent of the marine protected areas studied were not “ecologically distinguishable from fished sites”.
The study chose 5 characteristics to describe a well run marine protected area, and found that only those MPAs which contained at least 4 of these characteristics were effective. These characteristics were that the areas were: established for more then 10 years, allowed no fishing, were larger then 100km squared and are isolated by deep water or sand. When 4 or more of these were present it was shown that there was huge improvements in larger fish biomass with up to 14 times more shark biomass and 5 times more large fish biomass.
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However 59% of MPAs were ineffective and did not contain 4 or more of these characteristics, with only one of the 26 MPAs examined containing all 5. This means that simply saying an area is “a marine protected area” is not an effective strategy. The world must do more to ensure that these areas are researched to be important ecological areas and that these MPAs will be well enforced, allow no fishing, be larger then 100km squared and are isolated by deep water or sand.
Written by Andrew Hefford
