Protecting 30% of the Ocean Will Take More Than Drawing New Boundaries

The global drive to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030 is accelerating, but the scientific system guiding that expansion remains heavily concentrated in a few subjects and countries. A major analysis of more than three decades of marine protected area research suggests that conservation ambitions are advancing faster than the knowledge architecture required to implement them effectively and equitably.

Published in the journal Oceans, the study, "Marine Protected Area Research and Global Governance Priorities: Thematic Shifts, Geographic Inequalities, and Science–Policy Alignment," was authored by Javier De La Hoz-M, Humberto Llinás, Manuel J. Campuzano, Enrique Delahoz-Domínguez and Rick Acosta-Vega. The researchers examined 10,735 peer-reviewed publications issued between 1992 and 2025 to determine which subjects dominate marine protected area science, how research priorities have evolved and where that knowledge is produced.

Using an artificial-intelligence-based topic-modelling system, the authors identified eight principal research themes. Their findings reveal a productive but highly uneven field: established work on governance and biodiversity commands most scientific attention, while pollution, ecological connectivity and other emerging priorities remain comparatively peripheral.

A research boom built around a narrow scientific core

Scientific output on marine protected areas, or MPAs, has expanded dramatically since the 1992 Earth Summit and the adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity. The study recorded fewer than 30 publications annually through 1999, compared with 900 in 2025, producing an overall annual growth rate of 20.34%.

Growth alone, however, does not indicate whether research is keeping pace with the increasingly complex demands placed on protected areas. The researchers found that marine conservation governance accounted for 37.6% of all publications, while marine biodiversity patterns represented another 26.7%. Together, the two themes absorbed 64.3% of the examined literature.

Governance research covers the institutional, social and policy dimensions of marine conservation, while biodiversity studies document species, habitats, abundance and ecological change. Both provide essential foundations for MPA planning, but their combined dominance leaves a much smaller share of scientific attention for questions that increasingly determine whether protection works beyond administrative boundaries.

Fisheries and spatial management represented 8.8% of the literature, shark and megafauna movement ecology 8.2%, coral reef fish ecology 7.5%, and genetic connectivity and larval dispersal 5.4%. Coastal ecosystem governance in China accounted for 3%, while marine pollution and sediment contamination comprised only 2.7%.

The imbalance is significant because protected areas do not operate as sealed ecological units. Pollutants enter from distant sources, fish and marine mammals cross jurisdictional boundaries, and larvae connect habitats separated by hundreds of kilometres. An MPA network designed without sufficient knowledge of these relationships may expand protected coverage without delivering equivalent ecological protection.

The fastest-growing priorities remain stuck at the margins

Research priorities are becoming more diverse, but the transition is proceeding unevenly. Shark and megafauna movement ecology recorded the strongest upward trend, reflecting the growing use of acoustic telemetry and biologging to understand how wide-ranging species move through and beyond protected waters.

Marine biodiversity, pollution and Chinese coastal governance also increased significantly. Pollution research accelerated particularly after the adoption of Sustainable Development Goal 14 in 2015, while the growth of movement ecology became more pronounced during the period following the Aichi Biodiversity Targets.

The study describes the combination of rapid growth and continued structural weakness as "accelerated marginality." Newer fields may be expanding faster than established subjects, but their relatively small starting positions and the accumulated authority of dominant research traditions prevent them from quickly reshaping the overall agenda.

Marine conservation governance and fisheries management, meanwhile, declined in their relative shares of annual publications. The finding does not mean that researchers are producing fewer studies in absolute terms. Instead, the wider field is diversifying as specialised ecological and technological approaches claim a larger proportion of scientific output.

International agreements appear to coincide with shifts in research attention, suggesting that policy commitments can influence scientific agendas through funding, institutional priorities and demand for new evidence. The relationship should nevertheless be interpreted cautiously: the analysis identifies temporal alignment, not direct proof that global agreements caused the observed changes.

Research systems also respond slowly. Funding programmes must be redesigned, scientific networks established and long-term datasets assembled before a new policy priority becomes visible in publication trends. By the time evidence reaches sufficient scale, the ecological or governance problem it addresses may already have evolved.

The countries protecting vital ecosystems remain underrepresented

The geographic distribution of MPA research exposes an equally important imbalance. The United States produced 18.4% of the documents examined, followed by Australia with 10.2% and the United Kingdom with 8.6%. Together, these three countries accounted for more than one-third of the global research corpus.

Many African, Pacific and Southeast Asian countries contributed comparatively little despite managing some of the planet's most ecologically important coastal and marine environments. Tanzania, Kenya, Senegal and Fiji collectively produced fewer publications than the output the authors attribute to a single mid-sized European research institution.

The inequality is not limited to publication volume. High-income countries allocated 10.7% of their research to fisheries and spatial management, compared with 4.3% among Global South countries. Their respective shares of megafauna movement research were 9.1% and 5.3%, a disparity likely linked to the cost of tracking equipment, specialised infrastructure and sustained field programmes.

Global South countries devoted a larger proportion of their research to biodiversity documentation and marine pollution. Such work often responds to urgent local conditions, but an excessive dependence on baseline assessment can restrict opportunities to develop the advanced monitoring, spatial-planning and governance evidence needed to influence international conservation practice.

National patterns reinforce the connection between research location and scientific priorities. China and Taiwan showed a distinctive concentration in coastal ecosystem governance, while Brazil recorded the highest proportion of pollution research among major publishing countries. Italy, Spain, Argentina and Cuba placed particularly strong emphasis on biodiversity assessment.

The authors call the geographic mismatch an "epistemic governance gap": many countries responsible for globally valuable ecosystems remain marginal contributors to the formal knowledge used to design and evaluate marine policy. Decisions may consequently draw on evidence produced under different institutional, ecological and economic conditions.

The study does not argue that research conducted in high-income countries is inherently incapable of addressing Global South concerns. Its sharper conclusion is that funding, infrastructure and long-term scientific capacity influence which questions researchers can pursue, and therefore which forms of knowledge acquire authority in global conservation debates.

Reaching 30×30 requires changing who produces ocean knowledge

The Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework has shifted political attention towards the scale of marine protection. The study indicates that an equally important question concerns the quality, relevance and geographic legitimacy of the evidence used to determine where protected areas are established and how they are governed.

Short-term action should include targeted funding for pollution, ecological connectivity, animal movement and socially grounded adaptive governance. International organizations and development agencies can also strengthen requirements for local research leadership, equitable partnerships, shared data ownership and durable institutional capacity.

Longer-term investment is needed in universities, marine laboratories and monitoring systems across underrepresented regions. Low-cost sensors, shared research infrastructure and regional scientific networks could widen participation, while multilingual publication strategies could bring research conducted in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese and other languages into global assessments.

The analysis covered only Scopus and Web of Science, both of which underrepresent regional journals and research produced outside dominant academic publishing systems. Its reliance on a language model trained mainly on English-language literature may also have reduced the visibility or precision of non-English scholarship.

Assigning each publication to the corresponding author's country cannot fully capture multinational collaboration and may overstate the concentration of research leadership. The eight broad themes also conceal important distinctions within subjects such as governance, while publication prevalence does not necessarily measure research quality, policy influence or conservation outcomes.

Forthcoming studies should incorporate grey literature from governments, conservation organizations and national MPA agencies, especially where practical knowledge is substantial but peer-reviewed publishing capacity remains limited. Multilingual analysis, collaboration mapping and citation networks could help separate actual research scarcity from disparities created by language and indexing systems.

Protecting 30% of the ocean will be a limited achievement if pollution continues to cross boundaries, ecological connections remain poorly understood and local institutions lack the authority to shape research.