Almost everyone loves the ocean. But not everyone agrees on what it means to protect it.
But others say that’s not the case.
Some of those areas still allow for commercial fishing, advocates say, and fall short of protections needed to save marine ecosystems facing dire threats.
“It’s padding the numbers,” said Brad Sewell, oceans director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The disagreement comes as the White House on Friday outlined how much progress the country has made in achieving President Biden’s ambitious goal of conserving at least 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters by 2030.
The White House’s Council on Environmental Quality said its preliminary count — outlined in a newly released atlas — shows that approximately “one-third of U.S. marine areas are currently conserved.”
“We are making bold progress to conserve our ocean,” Rick Spinrad, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in a statement.
Yet precisely what areas on the map should count as protected has been a subject of considerable debate.
The White House said a majority of that ocean expanse — 26 percent of U.S. waters — is officially designated as “marine protected areas,” where human activity is typically restricted to protect wildlife.
But that one-third tally also includes parts of the ocean where only a type of fishing called bottom trawling is banned to protect coral and other bottom-dwelling creatures from nets that scrape the seafloor. Other types of commercial fishing in those areas, which include swaths of ocean off New England and the Mid-Atlantic, are still allowed.
“These are partial measures,” he added. “We’re at a point in time where the biodiversity crisis is crying out for not partial measures, but full, complete, adequate measures.”
Matt Lee-Ashley, chief of staff for the Council on Environmental Quality, said the Biden administration is using a “more inclusive definition of conservation than strictly looking at protected areas” but added the work conserving ocean areas is not yet complete and the administration is open to feedback on how to measure progress. The White House said the current atlas is in “a beta version.”
“We have a lot of work yet to do to develop the data and information needed” for more precise estimates, Lee-Ashley said.
Sewell said he was grateful the administration is “open to listening to our view that they need a more accurate protective number.”
John Hocevar, oceans campaign director at Greenpeace USA, warned that claiming that a third of U.S. waters are already protected is “a huge mistake because we are definitely not there.” He worries about the example the United States may set for other countries as they try to meet their own conservation goals.
Biden’s 30 percent conservation goal, dubbed “30x30,” comes in tandem with international efforts to protect nearly a third of land and oceans globally as a refuge for the planet’s wild plants and animals in the face of a growing extinction crisis.
“It’s bad enough to mislead the United States public with creative accounting,” Hocevar said. “But this also risks opening a door for other countries to try to get away with similar shenanigans.”
Marine ecosystems upon which people depend on for food face a multitude of threats, including rising temperatures, acidifying waters and growing waves of plastic debris.
When it comes to terrestrial ecosystems, the White House said it is on track but has not yet met its 30 percent conservation goal for land, noting that approximately 13 percent of U.S. lands have permanent protections.
