New Life for the Ocean - How Marine Protections Keep Our Waters Wild

Abstract

The ocean drives the processes that make our planet capable of supporting life, and contains some of the world’s most complex and diverse ecosystems.1 But these ecosystems are increasingly under threat. Pollution, overfishing, offshore drilling and other human activities are destroying ocean habitat and threatening marine species, with profound consequences for the biodiversity on which the health of our ocean depends.2 A growing number of scientists and conservationists are coalescing around the goal of protecting at least 30 percent of the world’s ocean by 2030 through networks of marine protected areas (MPAs) – protected zones of ocean where extractive and destructive human activity is limited.