Each individual who works on a marine protected area (MPA) is looking after an average 400 sq km of water, according to a global survey. This leaves the ocean much less protected than the land: research regarding protected terrestrial areas published in October 2022 found there was one person working on every 37 sq km of land.
The team behind the MPA survey says millions more people are needed to reach globally agreed targets on ocean protection.
That team is headed up by Christine Ward-Paige, of the eOceans company in Canada, and Alexandre Courtiol, of Germany’s Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research. Their survey collected information from 190 professionals working across 136 sites, which together cover over half of the total ocean area currently protected: nearly 19 million sq km.
Nations have pledged to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030, but progress has been patchy. Currently, around 10% of the ocean is protected, at least on paper. But highly protected areas – those that limit the most damaging activity and where enforcement is actually in place – cover a much smaller area, around 3.5%.
Insufficient enforcement staff can render an MPA nothing more than a so-called “paper park”, where protection exists only in legislation, and restrictions are listed on maps but are not in place on the water.
The survey received responses equating to 4,928 full-time staff, meaning around 35.7 per site. Extrapolating from this, the survey team estimates there are the equivalent of approximately 90,000 full-time employees in the current MPA workforce worldwide. That workforce covers 35,766,185 sq km of the ocean. Huge areas are therefore overseen by seemingly very few people.
Technology such as satellite monitoring for illegal fishing is often touted as a way of assisting overworked MPA enforcers but the team found this technology tends to be used where staffing is already ample.
Ward-Paige and Courtiol also warn that the global workforce seems skewed toward leadership roles. They say this is to the detriment of staff dedicated to work such as monitoring, enforcement and outreach.
“Meeting global biodiversity targets will depend as much on people and systems as on the designation of protected area extent,” the survey says. It recommends scaling up the MPA enforcement workforce to 3.7 million people to hit the 30×30 target.
“If society is investing heavily in fisheries, shipping, offshore wind, coastal development, tourism, aquaculture, and marine technology, then it must also invest in the workforce required to sustain the biodiversity and ecosystem services that those sectors ultimately depend on.”