Most of Europe’s marine protected areas, set up to safeguard species and habitats, will not meet conservation targets as they provide only “marginal” protection against industrial activities such as dredging, mining and bottom trawling, a study has revealed.
Low levels of protection in 86% of marine protected areas (MPAs) have left the EU far from reaching its 2030 biodiversity targets, which are designed to reduce the risk of species’ extinction, researchers said in a paper published in the One Earth journal. The EU aims to protect 30% of its seas by 2030, with 10% “strictly” protected from damaging activities.
“It is the first assessment of where we are in terms of protection,” said Juliette Aminian-Biquet, the paper’s lead author, a researcher at the University of Algarve, Portugal’s centre for marine sciences. “This shows that we are at the very beginning of protecting our oceans.”
The paper concluded that reaching the EU’s 10% strict protection target will require “radical changes” to the regulation of activities in its marine sanctuaries.
The highest coverage of marine sanctuaries in the EU was in Germany (45% of national waters), with France and Belgium not far behind.
The highest levels of “strong protection”, also defined as highly or fully protected areas, for instance sanctuaries that allow no extractive activities or infrequent fishing, were found in the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas. The European country that performs best at keeping destructive activity at bay in its protected areas is Slovenia, although the overall number of MPAs it has in its waters is relatively low compared to other countries, said the report.
The low levels of protection in most MPAs are a result of the “flexible” nature of EU directives, researchers found. “For MPAs to provide the expected social and ecological benefits, their role in regulating human activities to limit their negative impacts should be questioned,” the authors said.
“Getting the EU to do anything on this topic is extremely difficult, as regulation would need to be legally binding,” said Aminian-Biquet. “It is going to be up to individual states or regional authorities to take action to meet these targets.”
A spokesperson for the European Commission said: “The commission takes note of the very recent publication and its key summary findings”, and said it had called on member states to manage all MPAs in line with relevant directives and EU commitments to protect 30% of marine and coastal areas by 2030. They added that the 2023 EU marine action plan recommended member states phase out bottom trawling in MPAs by 2030.
The phase-out was rejected by the European parliament in January and most EU states have not yet set out measures on bottom trawling, with the exception of Greece, which became the first country to ban bottom trawling in MPAs earlier this year, and Sweden.
