Opinion piece: How do you uphold what you cannot see? The regulation gap in ocean conservation
Jennifer Sletten, lead attorney, The Anthropocene Institute's ProtectedSeas
Jennifer is an environmental lawyer specialising in ocean and fisheries law, with expertise in place‑based protections. With roots in Germany and America, her global upbringing and travels from a young age fostered a lifelong appreciation for the ocean. Since 2015 she has led ProtectedSeas’ legal team, demystifying tens of thousands of marine protection and fisheries regulations and making them accessible to audiences worldwide.
The “tragedy of the commons” makes limits on human use of the marine environment a critical part of marine protection. Yet rules do not achieve their purpose if people cannot find or understand them.1,2 Marine protected areas (MPAs) promise much for conservation but deliver little when their rules are not transparent. Without clear, consistent, searchable and shareable marine regulations, boundaries on a map are just that—cartography, not protection.
A global network of marine scientists, scholars, policymakers and enforcers is working to meaningfully safeguard the ocean. And it is a tall order. Protection demands cooperation, money, time and knowledge, including clarity on the extent to which the ocean is already shielded. Central to that is knowing how laws restrict human activities in defined ocean spaces, from MPAs to other marine managed areas.
In today’s digital age, sharing data is vital not only for research and collaboration, but also for public access to information that people have a right to—and should— know. The FAIR principles of data management—findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable—have become the global standard. Yet ocean governance often falls short.
The legal instruments that govern marine spaces—regulations, decrees, ordinances and management plans—can be surprisingly hard to find. Guided by the FAIR principles, our legal team at ProtectedSeas has spent over a decade gathering these texts to make them publicly available and reusable for anyone who needs them.
The search has not been simple. Many protections exist on paper but are nearly impossible to find. Belize’s trawl ban across its Exclusive Economic Zone is one example. It was easy to find press releases from 2010 praising this commitment, but neither the Belize Fisheries Act nor the Belize Fisheries Department’s website held the legal text implementing the ban. We finally discovered it cited in an academic article…on a tourism website for the island of Ambergris Caye.
Overlapping layers of governance add another hurdle. For example, in the Philippines, the National Integrated Protected Areas System Act and the Philippine Fisheries Code set strict protections for MPAs. Yet national law also allows local authorities to issue ordinances that can conflict with those protections. These local rules were not available online, and even local contractors could not get hold of them. We had to rely on non-governmental sources, in some cases decades old. In one case, I even used a photograph on a non-governmental organisation’s website: a sign with the restrictions handwritten in Tagalog, which I fed into a translation tool.
Outdated, non-digital regulations pose a further obstacle. Sweden, with its hundreds of thousands of islands and abundant bird and seal sanctuaries, illustrates the point. Some protections date back decades and remain in formats that resist digital use. We reviewed hundreds of typed and scanned pages, hand-drawn maps and handwritten notes, using a translator to extract the critical nuggets that defined the protections in place. Sweden’s management agencies, to their credit, shared as many of these documents as they could.
When rules are hidden, scattered or inconsistently published, the consequences extend beyond inconvenience to those attempting to assess them. Gaps in the record can undermine the very purpose of the protections. Without visibility, deterrence of illegal activities is weakened, leaving room for overfishing, habitat destruction and other harm. Communities lose confidence in MPAs when the governance framework appears ineffective. When the regulations meant to safeguard the ocean are themselves out of reach, compliance, enforcement and trust all erode.
Making regulatory information available to marine professionals unlocks new, fascinating ways to analyse and understand protection, especially when merged with other datasets. Regulatory data can strengthen research; enhance transparency (eg, help zero in on illegal fishing when paired with monitoring tools such as Global Fishing Watch and OceanMind); speed up assessments of progress towards protection targets; and support the development of shared data standards for marine regulations, such as the International Hydrographic Organization’s S-122 MPA Data Standard which will allow navigational restrictions to be displayed directly on ship navigation systems, helping users of the sea comply.3,4,5,6,7
The time when legal texts sat only on library shelves or government desks is long past. Ocean governance must step into the present—where rules are open, accessible and shareable—and ensure that the laws citizens are expected to follow are available to all.