U.S. plan to protect oceans has a problem, some say: Too much fishing

New details of the Biden administration’s signature conservation effort, made public this month amid a burst of other environmental announcements, have alarmed some scientists who study marine protected areas because the plan would count certain commercial fishing zones as conserved.

The decision could have ripple effects around the world as nations work toward fulfilling a broader global commitment to safeguard 30% of the entire planet’s land, inland waters and seas. That effort has been hailed as historic, but the critical question of what, exactly, counts as conserved is still being decided.

This early answer from the Biden administration is worrying, researchers say, because high-impact commercial fishing is incompatible with the goals of the efforts.

On April 19, federal officials launched a new website updating the public on their 30×30 efforts. They did not indicate how much land was currently conserved (beyond approximately 13% of permanently protected federal lands), stating that they needed to better understand what was happening at the state, tribal and private levels. But they announced a number for the ocean: about one-third of U.S. marine areas are currently conserved, the website said.

The problem, according to scientists, is how the Biden administration arrived at that figure.

Everyone seems to agree that the highly protected areas classified as marine national monuments should count as conserved, and they did: four in the Pacific around Hawaii, Guam and American Samoa that were set up and expanded between 2006 and 2016; and one in the Atlantic southeast of Cape Cod, designated in 2016. A vast area of the Arctic where commercial fishing is banned was also included, with wide agreement.

But other places on the list should not be counted unless protections there are tightened, said Lance Morgan, a marine biologist and president of the Marine Conservation Institute, a nonprofit group that maintains a global map of the ocean’s protected areas.

For example, 15 National Marine Sanctuaries are included. While these areas typically restrict activities like oil and gas drilling, they do not require reduced quotas of commercial fishing. High-impact fishing techniques like bottom trawling, which damages seafloor habitat and captures vast amounts of fish, are prohibited in certain sanctuaries but permitted in others.

Also included on the list are “deep sea coral protection areas” that ban seafloor fishing like bottom trawling, but not some other commercial fishing methods.

“Much more effort should be focused on improving the National Marine Sanctuary program and ensuring that new areas being created provide conservation benefits and ban commercial fishing methods like bottom trawling and long-lining,” Morgan said.

Senior officials with the Biden administration emphasized that ocean work under 30×30 was far from over. Very little of the conserved marine area is near the continental United States, for example, and one of the administration’s priorities is adding places there to make the effort more geographically representative.

But they defended the decision to include areas that allow commercial fishing. Despite the high-impact gear, national marine sanctuaries have long been considered protected areas by the United Nations, they pointed out. More generally, they said, the administration weighed various approaches to defining what it would count.

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