The Ocean Is “Protected.” So Why Is Illegal Fishing Still Happening?

0:00 Enforcement is the most underrated ocean tool. You can declare an ocean protected in a single afternoon, but what you can't do is protect it without showing up. Rules without enforcement are just suggestions. This is the How to Protect the Ocean podcast, your weekday ocean news update. If you care about staying informed on the ocean every weekday, hit that follow button right now so you don't miss tomorrow's story. This week, we're gonna be talking a lot about enforcement and action, and so every episode this week is gonna be themed around that, so you don't wanna miss this. Marine protected areas with adequate staffing, monitoring, and compliance systems consistently show dramatically better ecological outcomes than those without enforcement capacity.

0:48 The difference between success and failure is not the boundary. It is the budget. It is the patrol boat. It is the presence. This is gonna be a breakdown of what makes a marine protected area work. Last week, we talked about marine protected areas and what they are as paper parks and how useless they are. Today, we're gonna be focusing on what actually makes an MPA work. What actually is the key to saving the ocean? So the key question here is, why does enforcement predict ecological success better than the designation alone? Let's start looking at the enforcement gap here. So over 18,000 MPAs exist globally, right? We talked about that last week. Coverage has expanded rapidly in the past decade, but enforcement capacity varies dramatically between regions.

1:33 That's what we talked about with the paper parks. Many countries designate large offshore MPAs without increasing patrol budgets. Imagine any type of area in the ocean, especially offshore where you can't really see the coastline from that area. Imagine having one patrol boat to patrol that huge area. Papahana Makua Kia, for instance, that is a huge area to patrol. If you only have one patrol boat, you're never gonna be able to enforce the law because if anybody wants to fish in there illegally, they can do so without being caught, unless it's by satellite, unless they have their AIS or their GPS turned on and they're known to be in that area. But without the patrol boats, you're really not gonna be able to see it and attempt to attack or capture these boats to prevent them from doing it.

2:23 A protected boundary on a map does not automatically change behavior at sea. Just because there's a protection doesn't mean that people aren't gonna go in and fish. So there was a study by Gail et al in 2017 in nature, and they found that most MPAs suffer from a major shortfalls in staffing and funding. On average, many MPAs operate with less than half the recommended staffing levels. Enforcement capacity explains more variance in ecological outcomes than the size alone. That's how important enforcement is. Protection without presence invites non-compliance. So here's what the data shows about the staffing.

3:03 So in these key findings from Gail et al in 2017 in nature, MPAs with adequate staff had significantly higher fish biomass. Sites with high staff capacity had biomass up to three times higher than the low capacity sites. Staffing and budget were stronger predictors of success than the actual area size. So imagine having just a small area, but you can patrol it better. The quality of that area is gonna be a lot better than the bigger area that you can't patrol because that means you are actually enforcing the area. You were saying to people, hey, we're gonna find you. Even if it's a small area, we're gonna protect this area because it's better than having just quantities, better than having just a bigger size.

3:45 So instead of saying, hey, the bigger the MPA, the better we're gonna be able to have success. No, the smaller the, really it's the enforcement size. So the better the staffing and the funding for that staffing and the number of patrol boats, the better you're gonna have success. Doesn't matter the area. That's what it really comes out to. Size matters less than enforcement intensity. That's what it comes down to. So let's get into the funding mechanisms of everything. Stable line items and national budgets. So that's the line item that allots the number, the amount of money that goes towards these enforcement productions and staffing. Allow managers to plan long-term patrols and monitoring.

4:25 So a strong examples of the Papahana Makua Kia monument or Marine National Monument in Hawaii. So it's managed by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, and the state of Hawaii. It receives federal funding that supports enforcement vessels, research expeditions, and operational continuity. So this monument is not just declared protected. It has officers, it has vessels, and it has the presence necessary to enforce the protections that are guaranteed within Papahana Makua Kia National, Marine National Monument. When governments actually commit real budget lines, enforcement actually happens.

5:05 Now we look at tourism revenue and reinvestment for funding. Some MPAs fund themselves through visitors and like visitor fees and dive permits. I've gone diving in marine protected areas off of Costa San Martin, where you were actually allowed to dive, but you had to pay a certain amount. A little bit more than you would normally pay. And we were okay with that. At Bonaire National Marine Park, they even have divers purchase a Marine Park tag. That revenue directly supports reef monitoring, reef buoy maintenance, and enforcement. So healthy ecosystems attract visitors, visitor revenue funds protection, protection maintains ecosystem health. It is a reinforcing cycle. Now there's also NGO co-management systems for funding.

5:47 So government agencies often lack sufficient technical or financial capacity alone. At Cabo Palmo National Park in Mexico, the local community worked with NGOs and federal authorities after fishing ended in the mid-1990s. Scientific monitoring supported adaptive management, community enforcement increased compliance. Within a decade, fish biomass increased by more than 400%. Community plus NGO involvement increases ecological results and political durability. Now long-term budget guarantees also help. So multi-year funding allows strategic planning instead of reactive crisis management. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park is supported by federal allocations and reef trust investments, enabling continuous monitoring of coral cover, water quality, and fish biomass.

6:33 Long-term funding creates long-term data sets. Long-term data sets creates accountability. Having that long-term funding is really going to help the long-term success of the Marine protected area. What happens when funding is unstable? So then you get patrol interruptions. In the last few years, in several West African coastal MPAs, patrol vessels lack the fuel budgets. It costs a lot of money to get boats on the water and be able to work all the time. When boats remain docked, illegal trawlers enter the protected areas, even short enforcement gaps can create opportunities for intrusion. These illegal fishers are not messing around. They will wait patiently out at sea. They have the money to be able to wait patiently at sea.

7:14 Once those enforcement patrol boats go back in, they will come in and they will illegally fish as fast as they can. You also have monitoring gaps. You also have monitoring gaps. In parts of South Asia, if you don't have funded, donor funded monitoring programs collapse when grants end. Grants always have an end date to their funding. Although it's great, we've seen long-term data sets be really great, but you see data gaps in those long-term data sets. Because funding has run out or it came to the end of its period of funding. The people who are doing it are trying to get more funding. Sometimes you can't get the funding depending on how the economy is going and what the granting priorities are at that point from that foundation or many foundations.

7:57 Data continuity breaks make it impossible to measure recovery. Without consistent monitoring, protection cannot be evaluated. You have loss of community trust when you don't have the proper funding. In some Mediterranean MPAs, uneven enforcement has undermined local confidence. Small-scale fishers have reported stricter enforcement against them than industrial fleets, which face weaker oversight. So when these rules appear inconsistently applied, voluntary compliance declines. So if you have a small-time fisher, small-scale fisher, who's just fishing for his local area and trying to make money for his family, if those are stricter because they're easier to enforce, then that's not going to really help while the bigger companies are coming and probably getting more fish affecting the capacity of the small-scale fishers to be able to get fish in the future.

8:50 These industrial places, the companies are just coming in and doing whatever and they will not get prosecuted. Maybe because they have more money and the funding is not enough to pay for the court fees, who knows what that would happen. So trust is essential to enforcement. Once lost, it is difficult to rebuild. Now, if you want this type of real ocean protection stories backed by science, follow this show right now. Hit that follow button so you don't miss tomorrow's episode. So here is the final word on all of this. Enforcement is not optional when we're talking about marine protected areas. It is the mechanism that turns policy into ecological recovery. MPAs are necessity. They are crucial. They are critical to making sure that we are protecting the ocean, the most important parts of the ocean.

9:37 Thirty percent of the ocean can be protected, but it has to be enforced. Fish do not recover because a law was passed. They recover because extraction stops. The science is consistent across ecosystems and continents. When enforcement is strong, biomass increases. When enforcement is weak, paper park fails. That's really what it comes down to. Governments can announce protections all day in a press conference, but ecosystems respond to only what happens on the water. Protection works when it's real. That's really the lesson today. Enforcement is absolutely critical on the water in marine protected areas. It is very difficult to get protection across different marine protected areas or outside of marine protected areas, but those boundaries that are designated by law should be enforced by law.

10:25 That's really what it comes down to when we're talking about protection of marine protected areas. That's the episode for today. I would love to hear what you think. Go to speakupforblue.com forward slash feedback. You can either leave a voicemail or you can type out your answer. I want to hear from you. This is just the beginning of a conversation that I want to have with many of you. With you listening in this audience being like, "Hey, I have some questions about this. Let me know your questions. Maybe they'll spark another episode." I would love to hear from you. Go to speakupforblue.com forward slash feedback. And of course, if you want more of this type of content, you want to hear more about enforcement and monitoring and all that kind of stuff this week, you can hit that follow button so you don't miss tomorrow's episode.

11:06 I want to thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.