What percentage of the oceans is fully protected today?
We’re still right at the beginning of the protection of the oceans. We have something like half a percent or less of the seas within marine protected areas broadly, but if we look at what’s protected from all fishing there’s something like 1/10,000 of the surface of the seas falls into no-fishing zones. And even worse, of that perhaps as much as half of it is enforced. How do fully protected marine reserves compare to a protected national park? Marine reserves are both like terrestrial protected areas and different from them. Both kinds of protected areas aim to protect the animals and plants, which are within them. Unlike terrestrial protected areas, though, marine reserves can potentially support an extractive industry. And the reason that they can do this is because fish stocks reproducing inside the reserves produce an offspring, which are transported by ocean currents outside and into fishing grounds. And so you can have conservation and you can have economic productivity. You can
