MPA Guide Provides Common Language for Ocean Conservation
Creates framework for measuring effectiveness, and how to improve protections
Safeguarding ecosystems forever doesn’t happen overnight but strong, enduring protections can happen over time. The Blue Nature Alliance describes this process as a “conservation journey” recognizing that increasingly higher levels of protection, effective management, and sustainable financing are often achieved through a sequence of measured steps rather than all at once.
Newly published peer-reviewed research recognizes and codifies this progression in the high-impact journal Science. Forty-two leading marine and social scientists, including Blue Nature Alliance partners, contributed to developing ‘The MPA Guide: A Framework to Achieve Global Goals for the Ocean’ to standardize the understanding, planning, establishing, and monitoring of ocean protection in marine protected areas (MPAs).
The Blue Nature Alliance considers the MPA Guide an essential tool for the field as momentum builds toward protecting and conserving at least 30% of the global ocean by 2030 to secure and maintain a healthy ocean. The clear, common vocabulary provided by the MPA Guide, helps articulate shared objectives and in the design of the strategic interventions needed to achieve measurable outcomes for the creation of new conservation areas, and the expansion, improved management, or upgraded protections of existing areas.
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The MPA Guide: A framework to achieve global goals for the ocean