Resources

New research shows that bottom trawling — a damaging fishing practice subsidized by European taxpayers — costs billions, largely due to massive carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Forbidding the practice in marine protected areas (MPAs) would benefit marine life, the climate and the fishing industry.

Authors propose a novel cost-effective and scalable pathway that would enable and equip coastal communities around the world to establish and effectively manage their own local Marine Protected Areas.

Authors find that increased ocean protection could provide triple benefits: safeguarding biodiversity, boosting fishery yields, and securing at-risk marine carbon stocks. Results show that all coastal nations have priority areas that can significantly contribute to these goals.

The Global Deal for Nature (GDN) is a time-bound, science-driven plan to save the diversity and abundance of life on Earth. The GDN targets 30% of Earth to be formally protected and an additional 20% designated as climate stabilization areas, by 2030, to stay below 1.5°C, providing a pathway to ensuring a more livable biosphere.

The author presents 48 fishery-related and 31 tourism-related economic benefits across 25 and 24 countries, respectively, suggesting that well-designed MPAs offer sustainable benefits for fishing communities, while even suboptimal MPAs can provide economic advantages. MPAs are one of the best strategies for sustainable marine resource exploitation.

The Dasgupta Review on Biodiversity highlights the critical role that nature and biodiversity play in sustaining human well-being and economic prosperity. It calls for a fundamental shift in how economies account for natural capital, urging governments and businesses to adopt policies that protect and restore ecosystems for future generations.

This study provides the best evidence of tuna spillover from large no-take MPAs and its benefits to industrial fisheries.

This was the first study that showed at a global scale that, the more biodiversity in the ocean, the more benefits it provides to humanity and the rest of life on the planet. It also found that marine biodiversity loss is increasingly impairing the ocean’s capacity to provide food, maintain water quality, and recover from perturbations.

This meta-analysis shows that biomass of whole fish assemblages in no-take MPAs is, on average, almost 6 times greater than in adjacent unprotected areas, and more than twice greater than in lightly protected MPAs.