In 2025, an international team of researchers published a study evaluating the effectiveness of an ambitious ocean conservation program California started at the end of the 20th century.
The Golden State enacted the Marine Life Protection Act in 1999, a piece of legislation designed to protect the state's marine resources for environmental and economic reasons. The law created a constellation of 124 marine protected areas (MPAs) along the California coast — the first in the United States and the most extensive worldwide.
The selection of MPA locations was strategic. They were near one another to become ecologically connected, allowing each to be part of a larger whole.
Varying regulatory protections exist across MPAs, prohibiting or limiting extractive human activities to help increase the abundance, size, and diversity of sea life within them.
The network took shape over 13 years based on available science and input from diverse stakeholders, including indigenous peoples, who have been responsible for caring for natural spaces and conserving biodiversity for centuries.
"What everyone wants to know is: Do MPAs work?" study lead author Joshua Smith said in an interview with the University of California, Santa Barbara's magazine The Current.
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Counting decades to determine whether a conservation effort was successful or fruitless is a reality environmental advocates have to deal with. Luckily, the paper, published in the journal Conservation Biology, found that the reserves achieved many of the Marine Life Protection Act's objectives.
After compiling disparate data from the MPA monitoring efforts focusing on four different habitats, the researchers found increased fish biomass across the board. This finding indicates that species grew in size, volume, or both.
The authors noted that older marine reserves and those with more diverse habitats recorded higher fish biomass, particularly among species targeted for fishing and used for consumption.
These findings highlight the role of MPAs in sustainable fishing, food security, and health. MPAs can help ensure higher catch levels and improve human nutrition over the long term.
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Definitely 👍 "It was exciting to see that all of the planning and design that went into putting this huge network into place was producing many of its intended benefits," co-author Cori Lopazanski shared after feeling encouraged by what they found.
The success of California's MPA network is a victory for ocean conservation. Thoughtful modifications to it could yield pronounced improvements in species richness and diversity.
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