China, as the world’s largest producer and consumer of seafood, is well known for its voracious international fishing fleet. But a comprehensive understanding of the country’s efforts on marine protection, at least in its domestic waters, has remained elusive—even to many experts within China. Now, an international group of researchers has compiled the first database of marine conservation efforts in the country, and it is more extensive than many expected.
Ellen Pikitch, who studies ocean conservation at Stony Brook University in New York, first started looking into China’s marine protected areas (MPAs) after she learned of their existence at a fisheries workshop in China in 2014. “I was surprised because I have worked on ocean conservation for a long time but had never heard of them,” she says.
China does not have a publicly available database of its marine conservation areas, and the country has only entered about 15 into the World Database on Protected Areas, which is run by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. So Pikitch teamed up with colleagues including Guifang Xue, a law professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University who has helped write the legislation for some of China’s MPAs, and they built their own database.
Since there was no single source that they could consult to learn about China’s various MPAs, the team instead spent months trawling through old books, news reports, and press releases, and consulted a variety of different government agencies and officials at the national, provincial, and municipal levels. They also visited about 30 different protected areas to get a better idea of how they are managed. “It was really like putting together a jigsaw puzzle,” says Pikitch.
In the end, the team found that China has 326 protected areas covering almost 13 percent of its territorial waters—and they are still not entirely sure they found all of them. That exceeds the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity’s target of protecting 10 percent of coastal and marine areas by 2020. Many countries have now expanded that target to 30 percent by 2030, though China has not made that commitment.
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