Marine Protected Areas and the role they play in ocean conservation

IN a bid to advance understanding of ocean protection, a peer-reviewed study about Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) has been published in the Science journal.

Authored by 42 marine and social scientists from 38 institutions across six continents, the MPA Guide: A Framework to Achieve Global Goals for the

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Ocean also aims to assist in achieving global goals of reversing biodiversity loss through MPAs.

The guide categorises each area according to four levels of protection – full, high, light or minimal – tracks whether protection has been activated in the water and matches both of those with the benefits the MPA can expect to deliver.

‘The benefits of MPAs are key for our future, and for the first time the MPA Guide provides a way to track those benefits using a unified structure, shared language and a consistent approach.

‘This will provide an evidence-based understanding of where we stand on ocean protection,’ said Dr Kirsten Grorud-Colvert, associate professor at

Oregon State University and lead author of the MPA Guide.

‘With this clarity, we can monitor our global progress and identify the science-based actions required. We need to ensure MPAs are set up for success to safeguard our ocean and its benefits from the devastating consequences of human overuse.’

The guide is the result of a decade worth of inclusive, collaborative research, and could not come at a better time.

A convention on biological diversity, to be held in China next year, will be the platform on which the global target of protecting at least 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030 is set to be negotiated.

MPAs are a common tool for marine conservation, but not all are the same.

There are wide-ranging types of MPAs with various goals, regulations and outcomes.

Some MPAs allow fishing, aquaculture and anchoring, while others do not; others are counted on paper but are not active in the ocean. This causes some confusion.

The iSimangaliso MPA is one of 42 such sites, and was declared as such in 2019.

This MPA is a coastal and off-shore marine protected site, stretching from the Mozambican border to the Cape St Lucia lighthouse.

Originally proclaimed in the 1970s, the St Lucia and Maputaland MPAs were combined in 1998.

In 2019, a large off-shore restricted zone – the iSimangaliso Off-shore MPA – was added to form the iSimangaliso MPA.

It is South Africa’s only marine World Heritage Site.

The iSimangaliso MPA is broken down into in-shore and off-shore areas, with each zone within those areas allowing different marine activity.

There are eight in-shore controlled zones, five in-shore controlled catch-and-release zones, eight restricted zones and one wilderness zone

Off-shore there are two controlled pelagic line fish zones, three restricted zones and one wilderness zone.

There is considerable inconsistency in monitoring MPAs without guidance on their categorisation, or determining their likely outcomes.

One result is a mismatch between what an MPA is expected to accomplish and the actual outcomes, while another is the lack of a reliable way to monitor how much ocean is actually protected, leading to inaccurate numbers and disjointed understanding about how much protection actually exists worldwide.

By providing the science, evidence and framework to categorise the different MPAs, the MPA Guide equips stakeholders with the tools they need to ensure MPAs are designed optimally to deliver on their goals.