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Marine protected areas (MPAs) are regions of the ocean where specific human activities are limited or prohibited, and have been increasingly promoted by policy-makers, scientists, and conservationists as a tool for mitigating ocean threats, conserving biodiversity, managing fisheries, and enhancing resilience to climate change (Lester et al., 2009; Gaines et al., 2010; Lubchenco and Grorud-Colvert, 2015; Roberts et al., 2017). In recent years, the global spatial extent of MPAs has increased across the world’s oceans, with 4.8% of the world’s ocean area currently under some form of protection in 2018 (MPAtlas.org, 2018).

The political calls for increased use of MPAs arise from numerous studies that demonstrate that MPAs – especially no-take MPAs (also known as marine reserves) – provide significant positive ecosystem benefits (Baskett and Barnett, 2015). These benefits include increases in biomass, density, size, and diversity of life in the region (Lester et al., 2009; Caselle et al., 2015). Benefits derived from MPAs also include benefits to fisheries, including by facilitating the recovery of depleted fisheries and by providing spillover effects (Gaines et al., 2010; Halpern et al., 2010). Further, because they maintain all trophic levels of the ecosystem and increase both species and genetic diversity, MPAs can enhance resilience to ecosystem changes, including those brought about by climate change (Olds et al., 2014; Roberts et al., 2017).

Despite an increasing trend toward implementing MPAs, doing so in international waters has proved to be a more difficult challenge. It was only recently that MPAs were created within what are commonly called “areas beyond national jurisdiction” (ABNJs) (Gjerde et al., 2008; Wells et al., 2016; Smith and Jabour, 2018). To date, only 1.2% of the high seas fall under protection¹, which comprises only 12 total MPAs within ABNJs governed by two different regional management bodies (Ardron et al., 2008; De Santo, 2018). Ten of these MPAs are under the management of the OSPAR Convention and the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission. The remaining two are located in Antarctica and are managed under the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. Yet, ABNJs account for >60% of the global ocean by area and include critically important areas for biodiversity and ecosystem processes (Rogers et al., 2014; Gjerde et al., 2016).

The path to creating MPAs in ABNJs may become clearer. After 10 years of discussion, the United Nations General Assembly is adopting a resolution related to the sustainable use and conservation of the marine environment within ABNJs. This resolution will create an international legally binding instrument providing for the adoption of MPAs, as well as other key concerns such as marine genetic resources and environmental impact assessments (United Nations, 2017b). This process of United Nations meetings to create the legally binding instrument is set to end in 2020, although when the instrument will come into effect is still unknown.

Due to increasing loss of, and continued threats to marine biodiversity (McCauley et al., 2015) MPAs have become a focal point within international agreements and conferences in the last 10 years. This includes: the first International MPA Conference in 2005 and the adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 1992 (National Research Council, 2001). A number of international targets have been promulgated regarding the adoption of MPAs in national waters and in ABNJ. At the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, participating States agreed to designate a global network of MPAs by 2012 encompassing 10% of all ecological regions (Gjerde et al., 2016). This call was further reiterated at both the 2003 and 2008 International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Conservation Congresses, which called for protected areas to encompass 20–30% of all marine habitats (Gjerde et al., 2016). The 2010 Aichi Biodiversity Targets adopted by the Convention on Biological Diversity offered a new deadline of 2020 to designate 10% of the global ocean as protected areas. Finally, in 2014 the IUCN World Parks Congress recommended that 30% of the ocean be protected through the designation of MPAs. Given that <5% of the global ocean falls within MPAs, countries still have a long way to go to reach global targets and doing so in ABNJs will be a key element. Despite the challenges of creating MPAs in ABNJ, the increased development of MPAs globally has been accompanied by an interest in the role that MPAs can play in making marine systems more resilient to climate change impacts (Roberts et al., 2017). The increasing use of the climate resilience rationale for MPA creation (as opposed to a more traditional focus on biodiversity conservation) changes stakeholder perceptions of MPAs as policy instruments (Hopkins et al., 2016). Here, as we assess the future of MPAs in the new global ocean regime, the rise of the resilience rationale merits attention.

To study the voluntary commitment process of the UN Ocean Conference, we completed an empirical textual analysis of the content of the voluntary commitments. To create a voluntary commitment, a member of an organization must fill out a commitment registration form online. Some of the information is open-ended, such as project timeline, partners, and description. Other aspects are preset, such as what aspects of SDG 14 does the commitment concern and what features of an MPA are being committed to. The preset feature, however, also prevented capture of some finer details, such as size of MPA being proposed.

To carry out our textual analysis, we downloaded voluntary commitments² related to SDG 14 in September 2017, 3 months after the close of the UN Ocean Conference. This database is publicly accessible. To identify how priorities were distributed over the entirety of SDG 14, we sorted all the commitments by what sub-goals of SDG were selected as being achieved through the commitment. To gain a better understanding of what entities were creating commitments of SDG 14 overall, we then sorted commitments by the nature of the actor making the commitment. Actors include: Government, UN entities, IGOs, NGOs, civil society organizations (CSOs), Academic Institutions, Scientific Communities, Private Sector, Philanthropic Organizations, Partnerships, and Others. This pre-sorting gave us a set of voluntary commitments that were seeking to help implement SDG 14.5.

These 14.5-related commitments were then sorted into those that referred to resilience within the description of the commitment text. Because “resilience” was not a categorized keyword, we searched each individual voluntary commitment text for references to resilience. The various definitions of resilience were developed through a meta-analysis of 183 papers that referenced both resilience and MPAs. Papers were downloaded from Web of Science, a database, using a nested search approach. Nest one included the terms: marine reserve, marine nature reserve, MPA, MPA^∗, no take reserve, MPA. From that initial search, a secondary nest was created, using the terms: resilien^∗. This allowed the papers from nest one to be searched for references to resilience, resiliency, and resilient. From the papers, definitions of the various types of resilience were either given or created (Nocito, 2018; Table 2). AS validated the codes that were produced. Codes were reviewed three times by the lead author using grounded theory and followed Strauss and Corbin’s three step process: open coding, axial coding, and selective coding (Corbin and Strauss, 1990). In cases where papers from the meta-analysis lacked a specific definition within the text, definitions were created by referencing various papers to create a single, salient definition. We then used these definitions to code the resilience sub-set of the voluntary commitments.

To create a map of potential MPAs based on commitments, only national governments were selected, as other groups such as NGOs and CSOs may work in multiple countries and only governments have the authority to designate MPAs. The EU was also omitted for the same reason as it cannot establish MPAs without working through an individual country. Voluntary commitments were re-downloaded in December 2018 to create as recent of a map as possible. Data were sorted by the filters of “14.5” and “government entity.”

We quantitatively compared the distribution of the total pool of voluntary commitments among different entities to the distribution of commitments under SDG14.5, in which we assigned expected values for SDG14.5 commitments based on the initial distribution of all voluntary commitments. We also quantitatively compared the distribution of the pool of MPA-related commitments among different entities to the distribution of commitments focused on resilience. For this comparison we assigned expected values for resilience commitments based on the distribution of SDG14.5 commitments. All statistical analyses were performed as two-tailed chi-square tests, comparing observed distributions using the R statistical software program (base package).

The UN Ocean Conference brought the marine environment to the forefront of international issues. For the first time, various sectors came together to discuss issues surrounding the oceans, including its conservation and sustainable use of the marine and coastal environment. This is key given international targets and imminent timelines: to conserve 10% of the marine environment by 2020 and to establish a new treaty guiding MPA designation processes on the high seas by 2020. The large number of voluntary commitments made aligns with these global trends (Lubchenco and Grorud-Colvert, 2015; Boonzaier and Pauly, 2016).

Despite much interest by non-state actors (e.g., NGOs, foundations, and the private sector) in taking the mantle of conservation leadership, national governments still made the largest number of commitments. This is consistent with governments being the only entities with the authority to establish and implement MPAs (Agardy, 1994). Thus, the responsibility to fulfill global commitments rests on them. Yet NGOs also made their fair share, showing the commitment of external organizations in working with governments and communities toward developing a global network of MPAs (Christie and White, 2007; White et al., 2010). In our MPA crystal ball, there is a clear indication of the large role of non-state actors in the development of future MPAs, but no indication that establishment and implementation of MPAs will become anything other than a state-led process.

The voluntary commitments toward MPAs ranged from no-take commitments to multi-use and community MPAs. This reflects the complexity inherent in MPAs where trade-offs must be made between conservation and allowing for sustainable use (Hirsch et al., 2010; McShane et al., 2011; Davies et al., 2018). This may also reflect the multiple stakeholders involved in developing MPAs at the national level (Brown et al., 2001). Importantly, having stakeholders, such as the fishing industry, involved in citing MPAs can lead to higher levels of compliance (Oracion et al., 2005) yet it may lead to a less ecologically effective MPA. No-take MPAs, where no use is allowed, have been shown to be the most effective at conserving biodiversity (Lester et al., 2009; Edgar et al., 2014; Costello and Ballantine, 2015; Sala and Giakoumi, 2018). Also, some of the MPA categories, such as multi-use or community, may not even qualify as an MPA. Under internationally recognized IUCN guidelines, community-managed protected areas that are managed mainly for the extraction of marine genetic resources should not be automatically classified as an MPA (Dudley, 2008; Day et al., 2012). In our MPA crystal ball, there is a clear indication that MPAs are no longer just about fisheries conservation.

This research also showed that many entities view the creation of MPAs as a path toward resilience. One of the most highlighted goals of MPAs in recent studies are their role in enhancing resilience (Barnett and Baskett, 2015; Hopkins et al., 2016; Mellin et al., 2016). In particular, the voluntary commitment process involved a heavy focus on MPAs as tools of climate resilience, aligning marine conservation with broader discussions about trajectories for global climate policy. Climate resilience accounted for one-third of the total mentions of resilience, followed by ecosystem resilience at 17% of the mentions (Figure 4). Also, academic entities made the greatest number of references to resilience, which is perhaps to be expected, given the academic origins of the resilience concept. All of the references of coastal resilience were made by governments, which is in line with government priorities of their exclusive economic zones, which are located within 200 nm of a nation-states coastline.

Given that the bulk of the literature deals with ecosystem resilience, there may be a paradigm shift toward climate resilience occurring in terms of practical applications of resilience. This is in line with increasing evidence that MPAs can enhance resilience of marine systems under environmental change and stress (Olds et al., 2014; Mellin et al., 2016; Roberts et al., 2017; Darling and Côté, 2018; Laffoley et al., 2019). The increased focus on resilience in MPAs shows where priorities may lie, such as on resilient fisheries or resilience toward climate change (McClanahan et al., 2012; McLeod et al., 2012; Green et al., 2014; Ford et al., 2016). In our MPA crystal ball, the future aligns marine conservation, ocean conservation, and climate change global priorities, using the lens of climate resilience as a key organizing principle.

Resilience is understood as a key organizing and framing concept that shapes a systems ability to respond to external stresses, and it is a concept widely deployed in adaptation science, ecological science, and common pool resource management theory (e.g., Holling, 1973; Tompkins and Adger, 2004; Mosimane et al., 2012). But what kinds of resilience are being discussed in voluntary commitments? This research revealed the wide array of interpretations of resilience across entities, in line with the lack of clarity around this term in the literature. Nocito (2018) found that the amount of literature surrounding MPAs and resilience has steadily increased since the 1990s, but that only one-third of the papers gave a definition of what form of resilience the authors were referring to within the text. This is concerning when resilience is considered an aim or a goal of a MPA, as without proper definition the success of reaching that aim may come into question.

The voluntary commitments also provided a way to map out potential future MPAs within country’s exclusive economic zones. This mapping exercise shows what countries are – and possibly more importantly are not – pledging future MPAs. While each commitment has its own fulfillment date, this map will help predict where MPAs in exclusive economic zones will exist in the future. The majority of commitments were made in the Pacific, which is expected as the UN Ocean Conference was influenced greatly by PSIDS, as well as co-hosted by the Pacific country of Fiji. The single country making the most MPA commitments was Sweden, totaling in at 10 MPA commitments, followed by Canada at 8 MPA commitments. However, as a region, PSIDS proposed 32 MPAs within the voluntary commitment system. The government of Sweden has committed to fulfilling SDG 14 and Aichi Target 11 through their national legislation body, called the Riksdag (Government of Sweden, 2015). To date, Sweden has 1,373 MPAs in their waters, making them a leader on MPAs in the EU as a whole (see text footnote 1) (European Environment Agency, 2015). The PSIDS, as a unit, are harbor 466 MPAs to date (see text footnote 1). PSIDS have called for a strong commitment to MPAs in international dialogs, and emphasize their commitments previously to creating MPAs (Moses, 2017). In our MPA crystal ball, based on the voluntary commitment process, MPAs are increasingly a tool of wealthy, conservation minded developed countries, and small island states. The lack of commitment from major emerging economies is a sign that work is to be done to build a broader coalition of economic and political leaders for conservation (Miller, 2014).

Ultimately, despite slow progress on achieving global MPA goals, it is clear that the use of area-based management tools as policy instruments to provide protection for oceanic spaces is an idea that is not going away (Boonzaier and Pauly, 2016). Yet the idea of MPAs, like all policy ideas that have come into maturity through implementation, is evolving. It is moving toward the incorporation of a multi-sector, multi-stakeholder approach in MPA development and in the proposal process for MPAs. MPAs are now fully understood to be tools of climate change resilience, yet, ultimately, their success must still be measured by the efficacy of their implementation for achieving an increasingly broad set of policy-goals.

Sustainable development goal 14 is set to expire in 2020. By that time, the goal is to have 10% of the marine and coastal environment conserved through area-based management tools, such as MPAs. To date, only 4.8% of the global ocean is conserved (see text footnote 1). While these predicted MPAs will add to that, there is still a lot of work to be done to reach 10%. These countries need to act quickly to create and establish these proposed MPAs by 2020, for the goal to be met. Countries must also consider that not all MPAs are created equal. No-take MPAs, or marine reserves, are often seen as the strongest MPAs for conservation and restoration of ocean processes (Russ and Alcala, 2004; Lubchenco and Grorud-Colvert, 2015). If the majority of these proposed MPAs are multi-use, or with partial protections, it will still go toward that 10% goal. However, the benefits derived from them may be less than expected since they are still being used and subject to anthropogenic stress (Lester and Halpern, 2008).

With various international goals and targets aimed at reaching 10% of the marine environment conserved through MPAs by the year 2020, it is fitting that so many entities have turned their attention toward fulfillment. The voluntary commitment portal of the UN Ocean Conference allows these entities to receive well-earned attention of their efforts. From these voluntary commitments came a newfound movement toward resiliency, but also showed the dire need of operational definitions to ensure success. The different types of resilience show what types are being prioritized, and by whom. The voluntary commitment portal also allowed a map of potential future MPAs to be created. This map shows which countries are truly committed to fulfilling SDG 14.5, and emphasizes how few countries actually made SDG 14.5 commitments through the voluntary commitment portal.

All datasets generated for this study are included in the article/Supplementary Material.

EN, AS, and CB designed the research and wrote the manuscript. EN and AS carried out the research and conducted the analyses.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.