The European Commission issued a short film concerning Marine Protected Areas, which is the second theme on the agenda of the 2017 OurOcean conference, on 5-6 October 2017.
The meeting aims to explore how the global community could effectively protect the Marine Protected Areas by 2020, which are 5.000 globally, representing the 10% of the world’s seas.
As the film informs, despite the governments’ global agreement to protect these regions by 2020, today only one out of ten countries protect more than 2% of their marine areas.
What is more, these areas could bring significant economic opportunities, yet most existing marine parks and reserves are vastly underfunded. Without effective stewardship and surveillance, Marine Protected Areas fail to provide the safety sanctuaries they promised to deliver.