Unmanaged = Unprotected: Europe’s marine paper parks

An OCEANA Story Map

Introduction

In 2018, the EU declared it had met international targets for marine conservation, by designating more than 10% of its waters as marine protected areas (MPAs). However, this declaration of success ignored the fact that designation is just one step towards achieving real protection. Without effective management, designated MPAs remain mere ‘paper parks’ that provide little to no actual protection. As the EU and the UK aim towards a more ambitious target of protecting 30% of the ocean, a key question remains: how protected are existing European MPAs?

This story map builds on Oceana’s new report Unmanaged = Unprotected: Europe’s marine paper parks , which assesses the extent to which human activities inside Natura 2000 MPAs put at risk the features those sites are meant to protect. Through the story map, the scale of the problem of European marine ‘paper parks’ can be explored in further detail.

This map shows the percentage of marine area that individual countries have designated as MPAs. While the total area of EU and UK waters within MPAs is greater than 10%, at the national level there are clear gaps. Eight countries have not yet designated 10% of their waters as protected, and two countries (Ireland and Portugal) have designated less than 5% of their marine area as MPAs.

Yet designation is not the same as real protection. The below map shows in red the designated European MPAs as of the end of 2018 (which covered 10.8% of European seas), compared to the ‘real’ protected MPAs (in green): those MPAs, that exclude all extractive or industrial threats occurring inside them, following IUCN guidelines that recognise such activities as being incompatible with MPAs. These ‘real’ MPAs covered just 0.5% of European seas in 2018.

Designated MPAs vs. 'Real' MPAs

Zoom in and use the sliding bar to navigate!

Threats inside European MPAs

A troubling picture is revealed by analysing the spatial overlap between the largest network of European MPAs (Natura 2000, comprising 3449 MPAs in 2018) and 13 marine human activities that represent direct threats to marine species and habitats in Europe: nearly three-quarters of sites were affected by one or more threats, and those not affected represented a mere 0.07% of the total area of the Natura 2000 MPA network.

The highest levels of threat were found in MPAs that are adjacent to the coast – where human pressures are generally more intense – while threat levels tended to be lower for sites that are further offshore.

Click on any MPA to see basic information about the site, along with the number and types of threats affecting it.

Some human activities represent direct threats to marine species and habitats in European seas – including those that are meant to be protected inside MPAs. We selected the main sea-based threats (which can occur directly within the waters of MPAs) for which spatial data were available at a European-wide scale. The resulting 13 threats included in the assessment were: anchorage areas, aquaculture farms, dredge dumping, dredging, fishing, maritime traffic, oil and gas boreholes, oil and gas installations, other platforms, ports, submarine cables, submarine pipelines and wind farms.

The most widespread threats found across MPAs were maritime traffic (in 66% of MPAs), fishing (in 32% of MPAs), and submarine cables (in 26% of MPAs). In contrast, the least common threats were wind farms (in 0.6% of MPAs), oil and gas installations (in 0.6% of MPAs), and other platforms (in 0.3% of MPAs) – although these threats were still relevant at a local scale, because they were concentrated in a small number of countries. The pervasiveness of threats inside MPAs was also apparent at the level of individual countries: in all 23 assessed countries, threats were present in more than half of the MPAs.

The below map lets you see, by country, how many Natura 2000 MPAs are associated with each of the threats.

Number of Natura 2000 MPAs facing each threat, per country

‘High-risk’ fishing over protected habitats

For those 1945 Natura 2000 MPAs designated for the protection of seabed habitats (as of 2018), we assessed the occurrence of eight threats (from the selection above) that most directly affect the seabed. One such threat was fishing, which is a major source of pressure on seabed habitats, both outside and inside European MPAs: the mobile and repeated nature of fishing with high-risk gears causes direct damage to extensive areas of the seabed.

In total, 510 Natura 2000 MPAs designated for habitat protection permitted ‘high-risk’ fishing: fishing with gears that pose a high risk to the very habitats the MPAs are intended to protect. Such fishing was so pervasive that only 14% of the total area designated for habitat protection lay within MPAs that were not exposed to high-risk gears. High-risk fishing was particularly prevalent within MPAs that are intended to protect reefs, sandbanks, and Posidonia beds.

This map shows the average fishing densities (in 2018, in hours per km2) with high-risk fishing gears inside MPAs that threaten the designated habitats within them. Select one of the three habitat types to see the average fishing density with gears that represent a high-risk to that habitat.

For more details, see Oceana’s report Unmanaged = Unprotected: Europe’s marine paper parks.

This Story Map was produced by Jorge Blanco, Emily Fairless, Nicolas Fournier, Silvia García, Pilar Marin and Allison Perry.

Data sources used for the maps included in this Story Map:

- EMODnet. 2019. Human activities. https://www.emodnet-humanactivities.eu/view-data.php

- European Environment Agency. 2019. Datasets. https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/

- Global Fishing Watch. 2019. https://globalfishingwatch.org/

- SevenCs. 2019. WMS ChartServer. https://www.sevencs.com/chartserver/wms-chartserver/