New details of the Biden administration’s landmark conservation efforts, made public this month amid a series of other environmental announcements, have alarmed some scientists who study marine protected areas, saying the plan would designate certain commercial fishing zones as protected.
The decision could have a ripple effect around the world as countries work to meet a broader global commitment to protect 30% of the planet’s land, inland waters and seas. That effort is considered historic, but the critical question of what exactly counts as conserved remains unanswered.
This early response from the Biden administration is concerning, researchers say, because high-impact commercial fishing is incompatible with the goals of the effort.
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“To say that these areas, which are claimed to be for biodiversity conservation, should also do double duty for fisheries, especially high-impact fishing gear intended for large-scale commercial purposes, is a cognitive dissonance,” says Kirsten Grorud-Colvert, a marine biologist at Oregon State University who led a group of scientists who published a guide to evaluating marine protected areas in 2021.
The debate is unfolding amid a global biodiversity crisis that is accelerating extinctions and eroding ecosystems, a landmark intergovernmental study has found. As the natural world deteriorates, so does its ability to provide humans with essentials such as food and clean water. The main cause of the decline in ocean biodiversity, the analysis found, is overfishing. Climate change is an additional and growing threat.
Fish is an important source of nutrition for billions of people around the world. Research shows that effectively conserving key areas is an important tool for keeping stocks healthy while protecting other ocean life.
Nations are watching as the United States implements its protective measures.
The U.S. approach is specific because the broader plan falls under the United Nations Biodiversity Convention, which the United States has never ratified. The efforts in the United States are taking place under a 2021 executive order President Joe Biden.
Yet the United States, a powerful donor country, exerts considerable influence on the sidelines of the UN negotiations. Both the American and international efforts are known as 30×30.
On April 19, federal officials launched a new website informing the public about their 30×30 efforts. They did not indicate how much land is currently conserved (outside of about 13% of permanently protected federal lands), stating that they needed to better understand what was happening at the state, tribal and private levels. But they announced a number for the ocean: About a third of U.S. marine areas are currently conserved, the website said.
The problem, scientists say, is how the Biden administration arrived at that figure.
Everyone seems to agree that the highly protected areas classified as Marine National Monuments should be considered protected, and they did: four in the Pacific Ocean around Hawaii, Guam and American Samoa that were declared protected between 2006 and 2016 established and expanded; and one in the Atlantic Ocean southeast of Cape Cod, designated in 2016. A vast area of the Arctic where commercial fishing is banned was also included, with widespread approval.
But other places on the list should not be counted unless protections are strengthened there, said Lance Morgan, a marine biologist and president of the Marine Conservation Institute, a nonprofit that maintains a global map of the ocean’s protected areas.
For example, 15 National Marine Sanctuaries are included. While these areas typically restrict activities such as oil and gas drilling, they do not require reduced quotas for commercial fishing. High-impact fishing techniques such as bottom trawling, which damage seabed habitat and catch huge quantities of fish, are banned in some reserves but allowed in others.
Also included on the list are “deep-sea coral protection areas” which prohibit seabed fishing, such as bottom trawling, but no other commercial fishing method.
“Much more effort needs to be made to improve the National Marine Sanctuary program and ensure that any new areas created provide conservation benefits and ban commercial fishing methods such as bottom trawling and longline fishing,” Morgan said.
Senior Biden administration officials emphasized that ocean work under 30×30 was far from over. Very little of the Marine Protected Area is near the continental United States, for example, and one of the administration’s priorities is adding sites there to make the effort more geographically representative.
But they defended the decision to include areas where commercial fishing is possible. Despite the powerful equipment, national marine sanctuaries have long been considered protected areas by the United Nations, they pointed out. More broadly, they said, the government has weighed different approaches to determining what it would count.
For example, while an atlas of marine protected areas maintained by Morgan’s group estimates that 25% of U.S. waters are conserved, the U.S. Fishery Management Councils puts that number at more than 72%. Government officials said their numbers reflected important conservation work by a variety of agencies and stakeholders.
“We have a very highly regulated fishery in the U.S.,” said Matt Lee-Ashley, chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which is helping coordinate the 30×30 efforts. “And so our domestic definition of conservation may be a little different, and other countries’ definitions may be a little different.”
Although the United States has not ratified the Biodiversity Treaty, it will still submit a conservation total to be counted toward the global 30×30 commitment. Officials said they were still weighing which areas to submit.
In a statement, representatives of the Fisheries Management Councils praised the inclusion of commercial fishing areas, noting that they are managed under “very strict sustainability and conservation standards.”
But sustainably managed commercial fishing is what should happen in the rest of the ocean, says Enric Sala, a marine biologist who researches and advocates for marine protected areas. Allowing commercial fishing in places under 30×30, he says, is “padding the numbers.”
“People look up to the US,” says Sala, who is originally from Spain. “That sends a very bad signal.”
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