A project co-funded by the European Union is aiming to significantly expand Ireland’s network of marine protected areas (MPAs) as part of the United Nations’ target of protecting 30 percent of the world’s lands and oceans by 2030.
With E.U. backing, the EUR 25 million (USD 27.2 million) MPA Life project is being carried out by a consortium of Irish universities and state agencies and will “examine and develop area-based conservation measures for a wide range of vulnerable species, habitats, and other sensitive features that need protection.”
These measures in the form of MPAs, along with their conservation objectives and management plans, will be developed and delivered with the active engagement and participation of stakeholders and citizens,” MPA Life said on its website. “This will ensure a robust and meaningful process for the designation and management of MPAs in Ireland.”
However, some have questioned whether the Irish government will fully get behind the project’s goals. The nation has been criticized by nearly all sides of the ideological spectrum for its halfhearted implementation of MPAs in the past.
“Until 2023, Ireland was at the bottom of the ranking of E.U. countries for MPAs, and only thanks to new MPAs last year, it went from 2 percent to about 8 percent of its waters designated as MPAs,” Oceana Campaign Director for Marine Protection Nicolas Fournier said in early 2024. “So, not only did Ireland fail to meet the previous international UN target of 10 percent by 2020, but it will require immense and resolute efforts to meet the new 30 percent target by 2030 as endorsed by the government.”
Mark Costello, a biosciences and aquaculture professor at Nord Universitet in Norway, went further and told SeafoodSource that most MPAs, not just in Ireland, are ineffective.
“Over 90 percent of MPAs globally and all MPAs in Ireland and Norway allow fishing. So, they are not protecting nature at all. This is a big con in conservation. When I take a medicine to protect me from a disease, I expect to get the full dose which works, not some partial dose which does not work. Protection should mean protection,” he said. “The present approach by Ireland, Europe, and North America regarding MPAs is not going to benefit nature and will not improve the situation for people either. The benefits to biodiversity and fisheries from the well-established spillover effect are almost only achieved when the areas have no fishing or other human impacts.”
Thus, the very idea of MPAs should be restructured, with “no-take” MPAs offering the most effective framework for all stakeholders, Costello said.
“There is no published evidence of any fishery losing out to an MPA,” he said.
By trying to please everybody, governments are wasting money with half-measures to protect marine life, Costello said, positing that marine life would be better served by governments protecting 10 percent of the ocean properly than a “pretense” of protecting 30 percent of the world’s seas by 2030.
“The 30 by 2030 [UN] target [has been] diluted to being an effort to do what should apply to all of the ocean – minimizing pollution, [establishing] well-enforced, precautionary, management of fisheries, phasing out fishing methods with high collateral damage in favor of more selective methods with higher-quality catch, and more,” he said.
