10% of the ocean is protected. Now just 20% more to go

More than 10% of the world’s ocean is now protected to some degree, marking significant progress in global ocean conservation efforts, according to an Apr. 1. annoucement from the U.N. Environment Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC).

However, this accomplishment comes six years behind schedule, and experts warn that efforts must pick up speed to meet the more ambitious current goal of protecting 30% of the ocean by 2030. Achieving that will require protecting an additional area about the size of the Indian Ocean within the next four years.

The crossing of the 10% threshold follows the recent addition of 284 marine or coastal protected areas in Indonesia and Thailand to the World Database on Protected and Conserved Areas (WDPCA), a platform managed by the UNEP-WCMC. This database tracks progress toward Target 3 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, also known as the “30×30” goal, which aims to protect nearly a third of the ocean, as well as Earth’s land and inland waters, by the end of the decade. Prior to the creation of the 30×30 goal, governments were focused on Aichi Target 11, which called for protecting 10% of land and water by 2020.

The tracking system itself has recently changed. Formerly known as the World Database on Protected Areas, the WDPCA was updated in November to mark its merger with the World Database on Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures (WD-OECM). The merger effectively combined formal protected areas with OECMs — areas not necessarily protected for conservation purposes, but that may still deliver benefits for the environment. Some experts argue that many OECMs fall short in terms of suitability and consistency with conservation standards, which has generated debate about counting them as protected areas.

Currently, OECMs only account for about 0.22% of total ocean protection, according to the UNEP-WCMC.

One of the newly reported marine protected areas (MPAs) that helped push the world over the 10% mark, according to WDPCA, is the Timur Patani-Pulau Sayafi, Patani MPA, also known as the Patani-Bicoli and Sayafi Island MPA, that protects 3,376 km2 (1,303 mi2) of sea and coastal area in North Maluku province of Indonesia.

Other recent additions to the WDPCA that contributed to the 10% milestone include the 4.5-million-km2 (1.7-million-mi2) Tainui Atea MPA, which covers nearly the entirety of French Polynesia’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and is currently the largest MPA in the world. Australia also made a sizable contribution with the recent reporting of several new MPAs. These include a 400% expansion of its Heard Island and McDonald Islands Commonwealth Marine Reserve in sub-Antarctic waters to cover 380,654 km2 (146,971 mi2), an area twice the size of the U.S. state of Florida.

Both French Polynesia and Australia are among 33 countries and territories that have protected more than 30% of their waters, according to WDPCA data.

“We all depend on the ocean for our survival,” Neville Ash, director of UNEP-WCMC, said in a statement. “The great strides at the national level over the past two years to protect more than 10% of the marine realm is therefore a moment for celebration. But reaching this milestone is a reminder of how much work there is still to do.”

While the global ocean has now surpassed 10% protection, data is lacking on how “effective” these protected areas are, according to UNEP-WCMC.

“Target 3 doesn’t just call for 30% of the ocean to be within PCAs,” Ash told Mongabay in an email, referring to protected and conserved areas. “It calls for 30% of the ocean to be within effectively conserved and managed, and equitably governed, PCAs. Although we have good data on the extent of PCAs, the data on how effective they are is much more limited. It’s vital that this aspect of the target receives equal attention to coverage over the coming years.”

Another global marine protection database, the MPAtlas, which tracks progress in marine protected areas using WDPCA data, indicates that as of March 2026, only about 3.3% of the ocean is fully or highly protected, meaning that extraction and other potentially destructive activities are entirely prohibited from these areas. However, Lance Morgan, president of the Marine Conservation Institute, the U.S.-based group behind the MPAtlas, said the U.S.’s recent decisions to allow commercial fishing in its four large Pacific marine national monuments, which had previously been highly protected, might reduce the fully and highly protected figure by 0.5-0.7% — that is, if the decisions survive legal challenges.

In all other protected or conserved areas, activities such as fishing are often still permitted.

“There’s a lot of different levels of protection, and different labels that people apply to ocean protection,” Dan Crockett, executive director of the U.K.-based Blue Marine Foundation that campaigns for 30% marine protection by 2030, told Mongabay. “The same applies for OECMs, other effective conservation measures — they can both be a good or a bad thing. It all depends on what they do, the sort of activities that are permitted within them, and whether they are genuinely working to protect marine life.”

Crockett said Blue Marine prefers to work with partners looking to create highly or fully protected areas because these offer the “swiftest way to protect biodiversity” and “meet many of the goals of conservation.”

Morgan said he was pleased to see the number of marine protected areas growing, but that more progress had to be made.

“If 2030 is really the deadline, we are extremely far behind,” Morgan told Mongabay. “And we really need to up our efforts.”

So far, marine protected areas are overwhelmingly concentrated within national waters, accounting for more than 9% of the global ocean, while the high seas remain sparsely protected, accounting for only about 1% of the total.

Morgan said he hoped that more countries would urgently work to expand protections within their national waters to get closer to 30% protection. He also pointed to the high seas treaty (officially the agreement on the “conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction,” or BBNJ agreement), which entered into force in January, as a potential pathway for designating large new marine protected areas on the high seas.

“There’s quite a lot of hope, but it’s going to be a lengthy process,” Morgan said. “So if that can all happen in the three to four years from 2027 to 2030, that would be great, but probably a pretty Herculean effort to get these areas all the way through that process.”

Banner image: Humpback whales in Shark Bay, Western Australia. Image by Emilie Ledwidge / Ocean Image Bank.

Elizabeth Claire Alberts is a senior staff writer for Mongabay and was a 2024-2025 fellow with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network. Find her on Bluesky and LinkedIn.

Citation:

Cook, C. N., Lemieux, C. J., Grantham, H. S., Rao, M., Clyne, P. J., Rathbone, V., & Sharma, R. (2025). What will count?—Evidence for the global recognition of other effective area–based conservation measures. Conservation Letters, 18(5). doi:10.1111/conl.13150

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