MPA News

On 26 August, US President Barack Obama expanded the boundaries of Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands from its previous size of 362,000 km2 — already one of the largest MPAs in the world — to an enormous 1.5 million km2. The expansion creates the largest protected area, marine or terrestrial, on Earth. Formerly the boundaries of the MPA extended 50 nm from shore. Now they extend to the full 200-nm limit of the EEZ. All commercial extraction activities, including commercial fishing and any future mineral extraction, are prohibited in the expansion area, as they are within…

At the World Conservation Congress in coming days (1-5 September in Honolulu, Hawai‘i), there will be much talk about how the MPA community can best meet Aichi Target 11. That target, established under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), calls for at least 10% of coastal and marine areas… “especially areas of particular importance for biodiversity and ecosystem services, to be conserved through effectively and equitably managed, ecologically representative and well-connected systems of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures” …by the year 2020. MPA News has covered Aichi Target 11 several times, including how the phrase “other…

In late July 2016 a group of recreational divers in the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, off the coasts of Texas and Louisiana in the US, noticed something weird. The water was green and hazy instead of the normal clear blue. Large and dense white mats of an unknown substance covered corals and sponges that had previously been healthy. And untold numbers of other reef invertebrates — including brittle stars, sea urchins, crabs, worms, and shrimp — lay dead on the bottom. It was a bizarre and troubling scene, not least because the reason or reasons for the die-off…

A joint team of Portuguese and French researchers has proposed a new system for classifying MPAs based on what activities the sites allow and how those activities could impact biodiversity. The proposed system relies on scoring. An MPA that allows relatively impactful activities like bottom trawling, for example, would receive a different score than one that allows less impactful activities, like spearfishing. And both MPAs would receive a different score from an MPA that allows no fishing at all. The system also scores MPAs according to the presence or absence of aquaculture, oil/mineral extraction, anchoring, and boating. Under the system,…

Dear editor, The article “MPAs as ‘eco-cultural systems’: Indigenous people and the intersection of culture and conservation” in your June-July 2016 issue illuminates an important element of the heritage of these places. Too often the indigenous communities have had to work much harder than they should to have MPA managers understand, recognize and integrate their perspectives into the stewardship of these sites. Indigenous co-management can be quite successfully accomplished, and one need look no further than Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve/National Marine Conservation Area Reserve/Haida Heritage Site in British Columbia (Canada). The Council of the Haida Nation and Parks Canada…

Russia to expand an Arctic park In late August, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev of the Russian Federation signed a draft resolution to expand the Russian Arctic National Park, increasing its size from 14,000 km2 to 88,000 km2. The expansion area includes islands of the Franz Josef Land Archipelago and their surrounding territorial waters, and is intended to protect species like narwhals and bowhead whales. With the expansion, the protected area will become the country’s largest terrestrial park and largest MPA. A National Geographic article on the expansion plan is at https://oct.to/Z4U Poacher in Galápagos Marine Reserve is sentenced to three…