Are We Protecting the Ocean Fast Enough?

0:00 There has been an active campaign over this past decade in the 2020s, the Ocean Decade, to protect 30% of land and ocean by 2030, the 30 by 30 campaign. You've probably heard this a lot. You've probably heard this said. Some of you know what it is, especially if you've been listening to this podcast. Some of you haven't known what it was because you haven't been listening to this podcast, or you're just not knowing, and that's fine. Even if you've listened to this podcast and you haven't heard me talk about it, that's okay. I do have a lot of episodes out, and I completely understand. But today we're gonna be talking about the effectiveness so far, in 2026, of this campaign to increase the amount of percentage, amount of area that is protected in the ocean and on land by 2030. We are at an astonishing number compared to what we were at in the 2010s, and it's something to celebrate, even though we still have a lot of work to do.

0:45 So we're gonna talk about that on today's episode. This is the How to Protect the Ocean podcast, where you are getting updates on your ocean news every weekday. If you enjoy this type of content, you're new here, and you haven't followed the podcast yet, please follow, whether you're on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music. Whatever you listen to this on, your favorite podcast app, please follow that, 'cause the charts on each of those podcast apps go up when you follow, and more people get to know about what we are doing here on the podcast and here for the ocean, and the resources out there to learn more about the ocean. And also, not just look at my podcast. Go out and look at other people's podcasts about the ocean, 'cause they have some phenomenal ones out there. Highly recommend that you check those out as well and just get knee-deep into the ocean, like knee-deep, like, you know, waist-high deep.

1:29 Anyway, uh, or even under it. Get in there. Get to know all of them. It'd be awesome. But hey, look, this is what we do at the podcast. We talk about some of the optimism, some of the progress that we've made, and we have made progress in global protection of the ocean in terms of area. I'll put the caveats in after. But we have actually reached 10% of the world's oceans that have been protected, like effectively. That is huge. Is it enough? No. We need to get to 30% by 2030. We have four years to do that. However, it is ramping up. And where we were a decade ago, in 2016, we were not even close. We were at less than 1% of the world's oceans that were protected. Now we are at 10%. And if you think about how big the ocean is, that's a pretty big value.

2:10 That's a huge, huge value in terms of protection. And look, I've talked about 30 by 30. I've had criticisms about 30 by 30 because there's a lot of stuff that goes in. Like, what is a marine protected area? A marine protected area is an area in the ocean that essentially is off limits to ideally fishing, ideally like mining, drilling for oil and gas, all these types of extractive activities, even sometimes to people like scientists and everybody, 'cause they're full on reserve, because they want the fish and they want the biodiversity in there to recoup, so either for fisheries or biodiversity. And when you do that, these areas are, they go through a process. Like, man, the process it goes through, that could last a decade long just to get designated, and then it has to get funded so it can continue to go and work and be enforced and everything like that.

2:54 There's a process to go to make sure that this marine protected area, this area that we wanna protect, is the ultimate area that we wanna protect, and for specific reasons, whether it's like local communities can get access to it, or fishing communities can get access to it at certain times of the year, or they will benefit from the spillover effect of larger fish and more fish that come out of a specific species, or it's protecting a habitat that allows that particular species for fisheries to do really well when it's undisturbed. So there's a lot of things that go on with marine protected areas, and we need to have more of the ocean dedicated to protected areas, so we need to increase it by 20% to get to 30%. But the fact that we got to 10% is a huge win because, like I said, it takes so long to protect an ocean, especially when you're looking at areas, and we're gonna see more with the high seas, but areas where they're not necessarily managed by one nation.

3:44 Anything within the 200 nautical mile zone from coastline is usually the national waters of that country. So Canada has a 200 nautical mile along its longest coastline in the world. And so nobody can kind of impede on that. No other nation can impede on that, and Canada has its decision-making powers over that area underneath that surface. And so that's an important aspect to think. But there are areas like Antarctica that are managed by like 24, I think 24 different nations. So you need to get 24 different nations to agree on something to put in a marine protected area like the Ross Sea Marine Protected Area. Now, that took a while to get in because we wanted to make sure that all the countries were on board for this, because there was two, Russia and China, that were not on board for quite some time. But they eventually came to the table and said, "Hey, you know what? We want this to happen." There are other marine protected areas in Antarctica that have to go through and have been up for being designated every year.

4:29 They haven't gone through yet. Hopefully, one day those will go through. When? I don't know. But hopefully we get closer and closer to that. It's a lot because what we're asking people to do is take some of the most productive waters in the world and not fish in them or not do any kind of extractive activities in them. And then there's a lot of people who can benefit from having those extractive activities in the temporary moment. Because the reason why those areas are protected because if you fish all of it or you destroy the habitats that allow the fish to grow in it, then you are effectively dooming that area that was so productive before and giving you lots of fish and giving lots of biodiversity and stability so that fish and other animals can do well in those areas. You can attract sea turtles and whales and dolphins and sharks and all these kind of animals that really stabilize an ecosystem that we know as the ocean.

5:14 And so, uh, not having marine protected areas is not beneficial. Having those marine protected areas has proven to work and increase the biomass and abundance of fish, especially of commercially important fisheries, as well as other fish that are not even used in fisheries, but it stabilizes the biodiversity within that area So, there's a lot, and I've talked about the enforcement and everything like that, but the fact that we were able to get 10% is wonderful. Now, one of the things that I've talked to Angelo Villa Gomez, who's like a brother from another mother for me in the marine conservation world, we have a podcast together that we do live every Thursday, mostly every Thursday, depending on when we're busy or we're away. But it's called Polar Bears in Flip-Flops, so check it out on YouTube. We had a conversation recently on our last episode about the fact that coastal MPAs, like really close to the coast, are needed for kelp areas and for reef areas and for seagrass areas and mangrove areas.

6:04 But they're not gonna be that big because they're small coastal areas. There might be many of them, but there may not be one of these massive, massive, like biggest MPA in the world, if you've seen any of those announcements. These are gonna be smaller, and they might be connected biologically, and so there might be like a network of them, but they're gonna be smaller. And does that, we were having like this conversation, was like, does that contribute to the MPAs for the 2030? But it won't increase it by a lot. It may increase it by less than 0.1%, depending on the area of these and how fast they're gonna go in. But are they still needed? Because yes, I think that's the one thing that 30 by 30 ignores, and one of the things that 30 by 30 doesn't take into account is these smaller MPAs that are MPAs for habitats that have huge implications for biodiversity, abundance of fisheries and other important species that will scale into other areas outside of that habitat when they're protected properly.

6:56 Looking at these small MPAs are extremely important. It's gonna require a lot of local leaders and local heroes that will be able to do that. But those are where it's really gonna count as well, because these coastal areas is what keeps all this biodiversity and all this fisheries, 'cause eventually, with a lot of oceans, they have different larval stages, and they have to be protected in these seagrass areas, mangroves, kelp beds and all that kind of stuff, and salt marshes and everything, where they can actually be built and they can scale in terms of abundance and stuff and just go out into the ocean and keep it productive, keep it stable in wherever they end up. And I think that's an important aspect. But it won't necessarily generate a lot of percentage for the 30 x 30 because they're looking for big areas. Now, I know at the beginning of the episode, I said, "Look, we're less than four years away from 2030, and we're only at ten percent.

7:41 We have twenty percent to go." My prediction is we're gonna see a push over these next three and a half years or so, and we are gonna see a lot more bigger MPAs go through because countries wanna meet that biodiversity target of 30x30, that protection target, which I think is great. My one concern about that, obviously, I have a lot of concerns, but one of my concerns is the fact that, hey, what if they aren't looking at what needs to be protected? If a lot of these places need five years or 10 years to be designated properly when you're including all the rights holders and stakeholders together, how are we gonna do that in three and a half years? Are they gonna be effective, or are they just gonna end up being paper parks? That's the risk we run. But also from another standpoint, it's like, hey, if we can get them up there, we can build on them later on.

8:22 So my prediction is we're gonna see a push in area that's gonna get protected. Are we gonna meet the thirty percent? I don't know. We might. But I hope so. But it also depends on the quality of those thirty percent. But I'd love to hear what you think about it. You can join my Patreon, www.speakupforblue.com/patreon. You can join that. You can also get free versions of the episode. We have one where it's just the solo episodes, one where it is just the interviews that we do. It'll be like a Patreon feed that comes through. Those are free to join. And if you wanna join me where we meet once a month and we discuss ocean topics, you can join the community. I'll be posting stuff in there. We join the community, and we can have a lot of conversations about the ocean, which I'm super pumped up. That's speakupforblue.com/patreon.

9:04 If you wanna contact me otherwise, my socials are in the show notes. And this has been another wonderful episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I am your host, Andrew Lewin. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time, and happy conservation.