Consistency in conservation: Marine protected areas (MPAs) are now well established globally as tools for conservation, for enhancing marine biodiversity, and for promoting sustainable fisheries. That said, which regions are labeled as MPAs varies substantially, from those that full protect marine species and prohibit human extraction to those that permit everything from intensive fishing to mining. This inconsistency can in some cases inhibit both conservation and quantifying the proportion of the marine environment that is truly protected. Grorud-Colvert et al . review the consistency of MPAs and propose a framework by which levels of protection can be evaluated and improved. —SNV

The international community set a global conservation target to protect at least 30% of the ocean by 2030 (“30 × 30”) to reverse biodiversity loss, including through marine protected areas (MPAs). However, varied MPAs result in significantly different conservation outcomes, making MPA coverage alone an inadequate metric. We used The MPA Guide framework to assess the the world's largest 100 MPAs by area, representing nearly 90% of reported global MPA coverage and 7.3% of the global ocean area, and analyzed the distribution of MPA quality across political and ecological regions. A quarter of the assessed MPA coverage is not implemented, and one‐third is incompatible with the conservation of nature. Two factors contribute to this outcome: (1) many reported MPAs lack regulations or management, and (2) some MPAs allow high‐impact activities. Fully and highly protected MPAs account for one‐third of the assessed area but are unevenly distributed across ecoregions in part because some nations have designated large, highly protected MPAs in their overseas or remote territories. Indicators of MPA quality, not only coverage, are needed to ensure a global network of MPAs that covers at least 30% of the ocean and effectively safeguards representative marine ecosystems from destructive human activities.

Marine protected areas (MPAs) can provide a range of ecological benefits. Frameworks—including the IUCN protected area categories and The MPA Guide—offer tools towards evaluating an MPA’s objectives, types, Level of Protection, and potential effectiveness. However, the majority of MPAs exist in national waters, raising the question of how these frameworks apply in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ). We evaluated the existing ABNJ MPAs in the Antarctic designated through the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) using the two above mentioned frameworks. The newly released The MPA Guide, which complements guidance from the IUCN protected area categories, provides perhaps the most exhaustive framework as it seeks to evaluate implementation, enabling conditions, and outcomes. The CCAMLR MPAs ranged from Category 1A (for IUCN)/Highly Protected (for The MPA Guide) to Category IV (for IUCN)/Lightly Protected (for The MPA Guide) due to differences in management objectives and activities occurring within the zones of the MPAs. Given ongoing negotiations for a new international, legally binding treaty for high seas biodiversity, evaluating an MPA using these existing frameworks will prove useful to allow for a full comprehensive picture of an MPA and what it can expect to achieve.

Efforts to curb marine biodiversity loss have gained momentum through new global agreements extending protections across both national waters and the High Seas [1,2]. However, it remains unclear how to best capture the full multidimensionality of ecological features encompassed by the term “biodiversity” and, more importantly, how and where to prioritize conservation efforts to account for this complexity. Here we show, using AquaMaps 2.0 species distribution models for 31,426 marine taxa[3], that hotspots defined from the upper five percent of species richness (taxonomic diversity), range-size rarity (extinction risk) and phylogenetic distinctiveness (proxy for evolutionary uniqueness) identify largely complementary conservation priorities rather than a single shared geography. These hotspots span benthic/demersal and pelagic assemblages in EEZs and the High Seas, forming a continuum from shallow coastal habitats to deep-sea systems. Overlaying hotspots with cumulative human impact and marine protected area layers shows that exposure and protection are uneven: Asia and the Americas contain the most pressure-exposed hotspot areas, human impacts are concentrated mainly within EEZ hotspots, and only a small fraction overlaps high or fully protected MPAs[4–7]. These results establish a conservation- and management-ready framework at scales suitable for locating, comparing, and protecting the most irreplaceable concentrations of marine life.