Global Marine Protected Areas: Proposal, announcement, and implementation

Most large-scale conservation policies are anticipated or announced in advance. This risks the possibility of preemptive resource extraction before the conservation intervention goes into force. We use a high-resolution dataset of satellite-based fishing activity to show that anticipation of an impending no-take marine reserve undermines the policy by triggering an unintended race-to-fish. We study one of the world’s largest marine reserves, the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA), and find that fishers more than doubled their fishing effort once this area was earmarked for eventual protected status. The additional fishing effort resulted in an impoverished starting point for PIPA equivalent to 1.5 y of banned fishing. Extrapolating this behavior globally, we estimate that if other marine reserve announcements were to trigger similar preemptive fishing, this could temporarily increase the share of overextracted fisheries from 65% to 72%. Our findings have implications for general cons..., We constructed a global dataset of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) that records three key policy milestones: proposal date, public announcement date, and formal implementation date. To identify these dates, we reviewed multiple sources, including the MPA Atlas (March 2025 release), government legislation, official announcements, management plans, and secondary reports. For each MPA, we extracted the earliest available proposal record, the first public or official announcement, and the date of legal or regulatory implementation. Where possible, original source documents are cited directly within the dataset to allow verification.
Each MPA entry also includes site names, designations, site and zone identifiers, and governance classifications to facilitate cross-comparison and policy analysis. To standardize the dataset, dates were formatted in ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD). Cases where dates could not be verified were marked as “N/A”.
This structured approach enables the temporal sequencing of MPA ..., # Global Marine Protected Areas: Proposal, announcement, and implementation

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.0p2ngf2f1](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.0p2ngf2f1)

## Description of the data and file structure

This dataset compiles key temporal milestones for Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) across the globe. It records the initial proposal, public announcement, and formal implementation dates of MPAs, alongside source documentation for each date. These data were collected to support research on the *Blue Paradox* effect, where anticipation of protection may lead to preemptive increases in resource extraction.

The dataset includes MPA-level metadata such as site names, designations, and governance identifiers to allow cross-referencing and standardization.

### Files and variables

FINAL_Jahat_Garcia_-_MPA_DATA_SET_-_mpa_atlas_export.csv

Each row corresponds to a unique MPA or MPA zone. The dataset contains the following fields:

1. Data Source: The primary reference or database from which th...,