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
conservation efforts as well as the methods that scientists use to monitor
and evaluate policy efficacy.