France is shouting from the rooftops that it protects “more than 30% of its marine territory”, but this is absolutely not the case. A CNRS researcher 1 has quantified the “real” protection, i.e. the zones in which it is forbidden to destroy, and it is less than… 0.1% of the waters of mainland France!
This means that industrial fishing can get its hands on more than 99.9% of the waters close to our coasts.
So why call them marine “protected” areas if they are not actually “protected”?
It is to give the impression that we are on the cutting edge of history in the fight against the collapse of wild species and climate change, when in reality the only thing the government is protecting by allowing “protected” marine areas to be ravaged by high-impact activities is the interests of a small number of players: the trawlers, who working mainly for the supermarkets.
In fact, France has even been criticized by the famous scientific journal Nature for its environmental hypocrisy.
In July 2023, an IPSOS poll of 1,000 people showed that 44% of French, 52% of German, 60% of Spanish and 68% of Italian people naturally thought that destructive fishing was already banned in Marine Protected Areas. The same poll also showed that 78% of French, German, Spanish people, and 85% of Italian people were in favor of better protecting 30% of their waters, as per IUCN standards, while 81% of French, 73% of German, and 85% of Spanish and Italian people thought that “waters close to the coast should be reserved for small-scale fishers rather than continuing to leave them accessible to industrial fishers”
In short, people are ready, but the authorities are lagging behind. France still has a long way to go if it is to live up to public expectations, scientific recommendations and European standards.
This delay is all the more shameful given that protection works!
In 5 to 7 years, fish biomass multiplies by a factor of 6 or 7! When there is an overabundance of fish, they leave the protected areas and repopulate the ocean, which benefits everyone, but especially small-scale fishers. Having realized that protected areas are their best allies, fishers defend them very ardently. It’s clear that as long as marine areas are falsely protected and, as in France, form a complicated heap of useless and ineffective regulatory standards, it’s easy to understand why “protection” still doesn’t receive good press among fishers.
It’s up to us to get things moving!
Claudet et al. (2021) Critical Gaps in the Protection of the Second Largest Exclusive Economic Zone in the World ↩
Figures are everything in a world that has industrialized fake news. Here is a selection of data to help you understand the issues surrounding the ocean.
Why worry about 1.5°C or 2°C of warming? This is just average warming, with some regions warming 2 to 3 times faster. Europe, for example, is experiencing warming that is almost twice as intense as the global average. Climate disruption is associated with an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme events: heat waves, torrential rain, droughts and coastal flooding. Some regions of the world are becoming uninhabitable for humans: too hot, too dry, too wet, leading to mass exoduses of animals underwater and humans on land. This affects us all. France, as Europe’s leading maritime power and the world’s second largest, can have a knock-on effect on the international community if it leads the way to action.
The role of the ocean
The ocean acts as a global thermostat, but global change is jeopardizing its ability to continue to play its role as a regulator as effectively in the future.
The ocean has captured 20 to 30% of the CO2 emitted by human activities since 1980 1 and produces half of the oxygen available to life.
The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is the highest it has been for several million years.
The ocean has already absorbed 93% of the excess heat produced by human activities over the last 50 years. Its average temperature, like that of the globe, is only rising as a result.
“Blue carbon” refers to the carbon sequestered by the ocean. Certain ocean ecosystems, such as mangroves, salt marshes and seagrass beds, capture carbon at a rate 10 times greater than terrestrial and coastal ecosystems.
A large whale stores as much carbon over its lifetime as 1,500 trees 2, but marine animals store carbon over several million years as they transform over time into oil deposits.
The number of small “mesopelagic” fish, living between 200 and 1,000 meters, has been revised upwards: they are at least 10 times more numerous than previously thought, making them the largest group of vertebrates on the planet 3. These “myctophid” fish are vertical migrants that spend the day in deep waters and move to surface waters at night to feed. Because they serve as food for demersal fish living close to the bottom, at depths beyond 500 meters, they help to sequester immense quantities of carbon in the deep ocean: all the carbon that passes below the mixing layer of the ocean, beyond 500m, is trapped for thousands of years 4.
The state of the ocean
The ocean is by far the largest reservoir of active carbon on the planet, storing around 38,000 billion tons of carbon. By way of comparison, this figure is more than 28 times greater than the amount of carbon stored by the Earth’s vegetation and atmosphere combined 5.
The average temperature at the surface of the ocean is breaking record after record https://pulse.climate.copernicus.eu/.
Sea levels are rising by almost half a centimeter a year, but in March 2024, NASA warned of a sudden increase in this already worrying rate: in 2022 and 2023, the sea level rose by 0.76cm a year. This leap is thought to be due to the combination with the El Niño phenomenon 6.
The array of marine biodiversity has halved in 50 years…
The ravages of industrial fishing
Fishing is the leading cause of destruction of marine biodiversity according to international biodiversity experts (IPBES).
According to the European Commission, almost 80% of the coastal seabed is “considered to be altered”, mainly as a result of bottom trawling.
French fleets using bottom trawls scrape 600,000km2 of seabed every year, an area larger than mainland France.
In the North Atlantic, 90% of marine predator species (tuna, marlin, swordfish, etc.) have disappeared since 1900 due to overfishing.
As well as destroying biodiversity and marine ecosystems, trawlers also stir up carbon stored in ocean sediments that has taken thousands of years to accumulate (370 million tons of carbon dioxide). In the seven to nine years following the passage of trawlers, 55% to 60% of the carbon released enters the atmosphere 7.
Industrial fishing depends on public subsidies to be profitable.
Subsidies in France are mainly linked to exemptions on diesel fuel (63%) and therefore benefit industrial fishing, which consumes a lot of energy.
Unlike bottom trawlers, small-scale fishing (which uses “passive” gear such as nets, traps or lines) is more profitable, creates more jobs, does not impact the seabed, is much less dependent on subsidies and emits little CO2.
Marine Protected Areas
A summary of several studies has shown that biomass in strictly protected areas (“No-Take Zones”) is up to 670% higher than in unprotected areas and 343% higher than in adjacent partially protected areas 8.
In the Mediterranean as a whole, 95% of the surface area covered by MPAs is not sufficiently regulated by human activities to guarantee healthy oceans 9.
Macreadie et al. (2019) The Future of Blue Carbon Science ↩
IMF (2019) Nature’s Solution to climate change: a strategy to protect whales can limit greenhouse gases and global warming ↩
Irigoien et al. (2013) Large mesopelagic fishes biomass and trophic efficiency in the open ocean. Nature Communications. ↩
Davison et al. (2013) Carbon export mediated by mesopelagic fishes in the northeast Pacific Ocean. Progress in Oceanography. ↩
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/global-carbon-cycle ↩
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-analysis-sees-spike-in-2023-global-sea-level-due-to-el-nino ↩
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2023.1125137/full ↩
Sala et Giakoumi (2018) No-Take Marine Reserves Are the Most Effective Protected Areas in the Ocean ↩
Claudet et al. (2020) Underprotected Marine Protected Areas in a Global Biodiversity Hotspot ↩