Over the summer we took on a research project looking into what works in marine biodiversity conservation across the Americas. The effort was limited to academic literature and Mongabay’s reporting in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, but the core finding was unsurprising: marine conservation tends to work best when rules are enforced and fishers and coastal communities have a stake in its success. It also helps when programs are well-designed ecologically and socio-economically, funding is sustained, and decisions are based on actual data.
Six evidence clusters emerged: highly protected marine areas; enforcement and “paper parks”; community rights and stewardship; regional marine corridors; coastal restoration; and conservation outside protected areas. For each of these, we evaluated what works, the conditions under which it works best, and where there are opportunities for family foundations looking to support marine conservation. The assessment highlighted several illustrative cases.
Mexico’s Revillagigedo National Park was one example. The enormous, remote offshore reserve is famous for its populations of manta rays, whales, sharks, and large schools of fish. It is North America’s largest fully protected marine reserve, created with considerable political ambition. But Mongabay’s reporting found repeated suspected incursions, while complaints over alleged illegal fishing were unresolved or archived. The lesson was that unless detection leads to action, high-tech monitoring simply documents rules going unenforced.
Cabo Pulmo offered another emblematic example. Little changed in the first few years after it was set aside as a protected area in Mexico’s Gulf of California. But when researchers returned a decade later, they found more than five times as much fish biomass at Cabo Pulmo. The reason? Local families took it upon themselves to close fisheries across almost the entire park, beyond the smaller area that was formally zoned for no-take protection. In short, the MPA had fishing restrictions that were actually observed.
We identified some common pitfalls: creating protected areas without funding their management; treating illegal fishing purely as a surveillance problem; expecting communities to conserve resources without authority or rights; measuring restoration solely by planting counts while ignoring survival rates; and mistaking regional agreements or supply-chain pledges for demonstrated conservation outcomes.
I’ll be sharing more findings from the assessment in the coming weeks. In the meantime, the overview story.
