Beyond 30x30: My Remarks at the 2024 International Marine Conservation Congress


I was invited to speak at the 7th International Marine Conservation Congress and chose to speak about the strengths and weaknesses of 30x30 on the ocean.  Sharing my remarks here for posterity.

Welcome to the Beyond 30x30 Era

This is my first time in South Africa, and I just want to thank our wonderful hosts for welcoming us all here, and for treating us all so well in your home. I also want to thank the SCB marine section, the conference steering committee, and the conference co-chairs for hosting an excellent conference this year. And I want to thank all of you for getting up so early on the last day of the conference to come to hear me speak.

My name is Angelo Villagomez, and I live in Washington, DC and work for an organization called the Center for American Progress. My work these days is almost solely focused on the waters of the United States, so I want to recognize that there are people from 72 countries here and that my experience may not be applicable or relatable to yours.

Our organization makes recommendations to the United States government on how to improve the lives of Americans through bold progressive ideas, as well as strong leadership and concerted action.

I direct our oceans work and lead our efforts to collaborate with Indigenous peoples on conservation efforts in the US

The title of my talk today is 5 years to 30x30: Thinking beyond 30x30. What do I mean by beyond?

We are very much in the 30x30 era. 30x30 isn’t going away and it shouldn’t go away. At a macro level, 30x30 is catchy way to explain the idea that parts of our ocean are sacred and that other parts of our ocean should be used for shipping, fishing, and other human activities. Should that number be 30%? Or 10%? Or 50%? And when are we “done?” I think that’s all up for vigorous academic debate.

30x30 is easy to communicate. It might be easy to measure. Governments like it – and have committed to it. Funders like it. And there are great examples of where it works – like with the Micronesian Challenge and the network of MPAs in South Africa that I learned about this week.

But the conversation needs to evolve beyond 30x30 into something new. For example, 30x30 does not capture the greater attention conservation is giving to human rights, equity, anti-racism, and Indigenous rights.

Just as the conservation movement has evolved from prioritizing scenic landscapes, to wildlife, to biodiversity, climate change – we need better language, frames of thinking, and zippy catch phrases to explain what it is we are trying to do today.

It’s not that we should throw 30x30 out. We should keep the inspiring parts. But we are in dire need of a better paradigm to help us understand our relationship to the ocean post-2031.

I’ve been involved in efforts to protect 30% of the ocean and create marine protected areas for almost 20 years now. It’s been quite a journey. Most of my remarks today are based on that experience. I’m going to bounce around at different scales and I’ll try to be clear when I’m doing so. I’ve worked on the ground in the Pacific islands advocating for individual protected areas, in Washington, DC on the federal side of things, and globally, as much as any individual person can actually do that.

Earlier this year the Biden administration announced the United States had “conserved” – use of that specific word is important -- about one third of the US ocean. This is part of the America the Beautiful initiative – the United States version of 30x30 that attempts to tackle biodiversity loss, climate change, and our country’s history of inequities through conservation efforts.

Adding up how much of the ocean is protected or conserved in the United States very much depends on who you ask. The team that made this map – the Marine Conservation Institute – and many of the scientists who have adopted the MPA Guide as our measuring stick, would prefer the USA only claimed 26%. This is far lower than the 72% pushed by fisheries interests – and far, far lower than the 500% claimed by an industry group funded by oil companies.

But if you look below the surface at these numbers, most of the MPAs in the US are in the US Pacific Islands. And if you look at the smaller numbers on this slide – you’ll see that virtually none of the US waters around the lower 48, Alaska, and in the Caribbean are “strongly” protected or marine reserves. Specifically, 99.7% of the marine reserves in the US are around the Pacific islands. About a year ago half of those waters lacked management plans. But the Biden administration made great progress this year –and we’re now down to 40% lacking management plans.

And I’m here to confess that I played a role in this. I’m not rich or powerful enough to have been the conductor – but I was in the orchestra the whole time playing my ukulele. At some point in my career, I helped designate or expand all of the big American protected areas in the Pacific.

And before I get started, I want to hammer home the point that this talk is not a call to discard 30x30. 30x30 has important strengths.

This is a call to go beyond 30x30, to learn from our mistakes from the last decade so that marine protected area designation and management in the 2030s is better than it is today. We need a more holistic and equitable approach to ocean management, wherein access, equity, and quality are measured alongside quantity, and given equal consideration.

This is my island. I’m from Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands, the string of islands along the Mariana Trench. We’ve got some of the best beaches and sunsets on the planet. These are my grandparents on my dad’s side. I’m going to share a wild fact about my family. My great-grandfather Raphael was born when we were a Spanish colony, my grandparents seen here were born when we were a German colony, many of my Dad’s older brothers and sisters were born when we were a Japanese colony, and everyone since 1945 has been born under the US flag. For folks who may think colonialism is something that was left in the past, I assure you it’s very much still here.

And these are my parents. You may have guessed that I’m mixed race. I get my hair from my mom and my shape from my dad.

Growing up on the island I spent a lot of time hunting and fishing with my cousins and other relatives– my parents divorced, so growing up I spent part of the year in the islands with dad, and the rest living in Massachusetts and Florida with mom. And like all men of a certain age, for some reason I took a lot of photos holding up fish and other critters.

After college and a brief stint in Japan I moved home where I worked as a community organizer. I helped found an environmental coalition that organized weekly beach cleanups and tree plantings. And it was around this time that I was hired by the Pew Charitable Trusts to run their campaign for a large protected area in the Mariana Islands. In this photo I’m standing in front of a map of our islands and holding up a science report and from the looks of it I’m talking about deep sea vents.

Pew was involved with the 2006 designation of what is today the Papahanaumokuakea marine national monument, and after that success they scoped the world for other places where that success could be repeated. I don’t have a map her – but at the time there were only three large protected areas. There was the Great Barrier Reef, Hawaii, and the Phoenix Islands.

My involvement with what eventually become the Mariana Trench monument started in January 2007, when I met with Jay Nelson from Pew. We sat down for two hours, and he explained how Pew had funded a study to identify potential protected areas around the world modeled after the success in Hawaii. Over the years I have heard him give this pitch several times, so these four criteria are seared into my brain. Pew was looking for places that were big, in a place with little to no fishing, in a country with a history of conservation, with some hope of enforcement. I’ll come back to these four criteria later in my talk, but for now, I’ll just say that the Marianas ticked all four of these boxes.

24 months later, with a few trips to DC, countless meetings, petitions, and letters in between, I was invited to the White House to watch President Bush designate what were at the time three of the largest protected areas in the world– Rose Atoll, Pacific Remote Islands, and Mariana Trench.

You’ll hear a lot of conservation advocates call these designations a “finish line.” Hindsight assures me they are truly starting lines. But on that day, I was just happy. I got to take my picture with Sylvia Earle and one of the Cousteaus and President Bush nodded right at me at the part in his speech where he talked about Indigenous peoples. I had no idea at the time that it would take 15 years to go from designation to management plan – or that nearly all of the funding for the three monuments would go to Hawaii or support researchers in US universities, not my community.

About a year later I moved to DC and worked for Pew for another 12 years as a DC policy wonk. I worked on sharks for 5 years, then when back to protected areas working for the Pew Bertarelli Ocean Legacy and then the Blue Nature Alliance.

The Bush monuments kicked off a global race to designate larger and larger marine protected areas around the world. Between 2006 and today there has been a 10x increase in the amount of ocean that is protected.

This growth wasn’t by accident. For more than 20 years scientists and governments have been calling for increased protection on the ocean. Starting with the Millenium Development Goals in 2000, here are some of these agreements mapped against the actual area of protected ocean. Whether that ambition has been 8.4%, 10% or 30%, outcomes on the water have always lagged far behind.

I just want to share some of the language of these area target commitments, because they often get shortened to 20x20 or 30x30, but there’s actually much more to them. The Durban agreement from 2003 mentions “strict” protections.” My work on 30x30 started in 2006 with the start of the regional 30% goal in Micronesia, called the Micronesia Challenge – started by Pew Fellow Willy Kostka and the president of Palau. In 2011, we introduced the term Other Effective Conservation Measures or OECMs. The 2014 and 2016 IUCN agreements talk about “highly protected” and “no extractive activities.” We’re also seeing language for Indigenous peoples in 2016. But “strict” and “highly protected” is noticeably absent from the Kunming Montreal targets. There are literal conferences around all this language, so I’m not going to dive too deep here – just want to point out there’s a lot more to this work than just 30x30.

And also, before I really get into it, this plenary is not a criticism of MPAs! We have the science to know when MPAs work and when they don’t work.

And we have Daniel Pauly, who told us at IMPAC5 last year “it is now quasi-impossible to assert, with a straight face, that MPAs do not work the way they are intended to.” We know MPAs work – my questions are rather, do area targets lead to more and better MPAs? Maybe you can help me answer that.

AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION – ASKED A SERIES OF QUESTIONS ON THE SLIDES

I started off with a slide of the United States, showing how nearly all the marine reserves are in the Pacific Islands, our overseas territories. I also briefly touched upon how despite 99.7% of the marine reserves in the United States being in the Pacific Islands most of the people WORKING and BENEFITING from marine reserves in the United States are NOT Pacific Islanders

I then drilled down to my experiences in the Marianas and how the unlikeliest of presidents sought to secure a “blue legacy” by protecting the ocean – and just as an aside. It kind of worked?

I now want to start to zoom out and look at the rest of the world, and I’m going to start that story the year after Columbus got lost and thought he landed in India. Just a trigger warning – I’m going to say some things that may difficult for some of you to hear.

Does anyone know who this is? I’ll give you a hint – he was born in what we call Spain today. And he was the final boss fight in the video game Assassin’s creed II – I’m not making this up. And Jeremy Irons played him on TV

Rodrigo Borgia!! He would eventually become Pope Alexander VI. White dudes deciding what’s good for half the planet is a 500 year old idea, and Pope Alexander VI is the original Half Earth bro.

So here is a map of the world as we know it today. In fourteen hundred ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue

But then in fourteen hundred ninety three, Pope Alexander VI issued a papal bull “Inter Caetera” and gave the new world to Spain

This really upset the Portuguese. But in the immortal spirit of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the two countries said, “We Can Work It Out” and in 1494 they both signed the Treaty of Tordesillas.

This gave half the globe 370 leagues west of Cape Verde to Spain and the other half to Portugal. The way this line is drawn is why they speak Portuguese in Brazil, but Spanish in Argentina and Chile. And it’s why so many people living in those former colonies are Catholic.

This was the first instance of a powerful man in Europe carving up the globe by drawing lines on a map – and I don’t think I need to tell anyone in Africa or the Middle East how many problems this practice has caused.

This treaty disrupted the lives of millions of non-Christian Indigenous peoples. I’m a great example of that. Magellan landed in Guam in 1521 – 503 years ago. One day a Spanish sailor named Crisobal Villagomez landed in Guam and 250 years later one of his descendants named their kid Angelo Villagomez. We’re still Spanish. And we’re all still Catholic. One of the really sinister legacies of genocide and colonialism is how it strips people of their identity. Chamorro, the name of my people is not something we named ourselves – it is what the Spanish called us. And the name of our land is not our own – it is named after the Spanish Queen who colonized us.

I talked about my family history at the start of this presentation. Generations of my family have been punished by the colonizers – including the United States -- for speaking our native language. English is my primary language, and I speak with an American accent because the United States won a war – and because our previous colonizers, Spain, Germany, and Japan lost one.

There would be more half earth bros. In 1612, the British and Dutch signed the Treaty of Dover, giving the Northern Hemisphere to the British and the Southern Hemisphere to the Dutch. They agreed to convert everyone they met to be Protestant.

Other colonizing countries wouldn’t draw such straight lines. The French thought it was their job to civilize the ancient cultures in Asia and Africa and the US thought it was its Manifest destiny to steal all of the Native land between New York and Los Angeles.

And these lines were never static. The United States claimed any island with Guano on it in the mid-19th Century, overthrew the Hawaiian government in 1898, and by the end of World War II controlled every island between the Philippines and the Line Islands.

In the second half of the 20th century, many former colonies achieved freedom and became independent nations. But there are still remaining colonies, particularly island nations in the Pacific and Atlantic.

Drawing lines eventually extended to the ocean and in 1994 the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea was ratified and every country with a coastline was given economic control of the sea out to 200 nautical miles from shore.

You are probably uncomfortably asking yourself why I’m bringing this up at an ocean conservation meeting. It’s because the combination of colonialism and EEZs have been the deciding factor in the success of 30x30 to date.

If you look at the top 20 largest marine reserves around the world, which together account for 92.6% of global coverage – this is how many are in overseas territories.

The biggest burden of achieving 30x30 is being carried by these overseas territories – and in many cases – and absolutely in the United States – nearly all of the benefit goes to white led institutions in Capitals like London, Paris, and Washington, DC or to universities and research centers across the country.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that these actions from decades and centuries ago are the sole reason why these areas are protected over others. There is a powerful fishing industry that fights designations. But it is politically easier to force policies onto territories, especially when it is done with the stroke of an executive’s pen.

At this point it’s worth revisiting the criteria for selecting big MPAs. 20 years of work looking for areas that were big, with limited fishing, in a country with a history of conservation, and some hope of enforcement brought us to this point. But if we instead had looked for overseas territories PAUSE of wealthy countries with large powerful militaries where mostly Indigenous people have limited voting power – we’d be in the exact damn place.

Beth Pike led on a paper that assessed the 100 largest global MPAs against the MPA guide. Her team is presenting on this work in this room in the next session, so I won’t get into the details, but her work gives number to how much of our MPA coverage lies in “distant EEZs.” Her team also found that too many MPAs are poorly designed, meaning they allow damaging activities, or are poorly implemented, meaning they lack management plans or staff.

The take home is that our understanding of how much of the ocean is protected or conserved is vastly overestimated, and those areas that are well protected are mostly the burden of Indigenous peoples. My opinion is that 30x30 on the ocean has reached a breaking point because we have run out of colonies to protect.

The Marine Biodiversity Dialogues funded by Lenfest and the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation found a different shortcoming – namely that in the US – only a fraction of the biodiversity in the ocean is contained within MPAs. Mostly because they are all concentrated in one region of the country as I’ve already shown.

These issues are very frustrating for the well-meaning 30x30 advocate. We are very used to having fishermen disagree with us, but many liberal institutions are ill equipped to understand never mind deal with the issues that black, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities deal with. And there are scientists like Beth Pike pointing out that despite our best efforts, too many of our outcomes are poorly designed, poorly implemented, and unjust

This brings me to Goodhart’s Law – coined by British economist Charles Goodhart. It was first used to criticize British monetary policy – but since we’re in South Africa, and since Arthur did it during his plenary, I asked ChatGPT to explain Goodhart’s Law to me using cricket as an example.

Imagine Cricket South Africa (CSA) sets a target to improve the team’s batting average to boost overall performance. Initially, this seems like a good measure to enhance the team’s competitiveness. However, as players and coaches focus solely on improving batting averages, unintended consequences might arise:

For example, Batsmen might start playing more conservatively to avoid getting out, leading to fewer risks and potentially lower overall scores. This could make matches less exciting and reduce the team’s chances of winning in situations that require aggressive play.

In essence, by turning the batting average into a primary target, CSA might inadvertently undermine the broader goal of improving overall team performance.

One expression of the unintended consequences of Goodhart’s Law applied to ocean conservation are the 9 countries or territories reporting more than 99% of their ocean as protected to WDPA. I’ve heard “whole ocean management” mentioned a few times this week, but I mean, come on.

There are also a lot of MPAs that were designated in places where there was no fishing taking place. Veronica Relano used Sea Around Us data to show that EEZ designations did more to stop foreign fishing than subsequent MPA designations. In places where there was no domestic fleet to fill the void, the EEZ turned into de-facto no-take MPAs long before the eventual MPA was designated. In other places, domestic fishing continued.

Relano only looked at 4 EEZs in that paper, but you can look at Global Fishing Watch to get a sense that this phenomena exists in a other places. A lot of the oversea territories are unfished, while their surrounding waters are. I can highlight the Marianas here – the EEZ is over 1 million square kilometers and the MPA is only 40 thousand – but there’s been virtually no fishing there since 1983. It’s not the MPA, it’s the EEZ.

And if we’re only protecting places that have no fishing – then there’s strong evidence we’ve actually already achieved 30x30. A few years back David Kroodsma and others used AIS data to show that 55% of the ocean was fished.

Ricardo Amoroso and others used the same data set – just smaller grids – to show that only 4% of the ocean if fished.

There is a real threat that saying you’ve protected 30% of the ocean is becoming more important than actually protecting the ocean. And this is the place where 30x30 fails – when it becomes an exercise in creative accounting – not one of taking bold action to deliver conservation policy, and doing the hard work to ensure it gets actively managed.

I do think we’re very much in our 30x30 era – and it would be ridiculous for me to claim that all the global leaders, funders, NGOs, and communities who are bought into this movement are wrong. I don’t think they are wrong. But I think the usefulness of 30x30 is based on outdated values, so I’m not asking that it go away, but rather I’m hopeful that something new will emerge out of it.

I think we can still take the best parts of 30x30 – the agreement that there are sacred places in the ocean, an understanding that there needs to be on the ground action with benefits and costs shared equitably, the promise of international support with funding and expertise, and a commitment to not walk away once a ‘win’ is achieved, and to support communities for the long term.

I am very concerned about the goals that our movement is going to set for ourselves in the 2030s. I am worried that a Half Earth movement or 50x50 will lead to more lines on maps made by rich, powerful men and an amplification of all the worst shortcomings of 30x30.

I think a lot of the ideas for what ocean conservation will look like in the 2030s are already inside the heads of the people in this room. In the many talks I heard this week I heard so many great stories and strong ideas for improving what we do.

Many of the MPA Guide scientists talked about the need to focus on quality over quantity to deliver conservation.

Asha DeVos always reminds us that every coastline needs a hero.

Barbara Horta e Costa spoke about how active management provides better outcomes than areas that are simply implemented.

Ana Spalding spoke about how different types of metrics – like measuring participation in MPA processes – can be used to define success. She also asked what a post-30x30 era looks like

Steve Johnson spoke about how it takes a long time to implement big MPAs. That doesn’t mean we should give up on them, it means that those communities and managers need greater levels of support.

And organizations like Blue Nature Alliance and Big Ocean are working to make all those big MPAs more equitable, MCI and the greenlist are working to make them better, and I heard multiple strategies for changing the how of conservation.

2024 is six years away from the 2030 deadline. At this point in 2014, we were already talking about the next thing – dubbing it “the post 2020 framework.” We need a post 2030 framework, but it needs to take into account all of the social science we have collected in the last decade and combine it with Indigenous Knowledge to come up with goals that inspire action.

My friend Chris Parsons likes to say that it takes 10 years to go from science to policy, and 30% has been around for 20 years already. It is woefully out of date in a post-George Floyd, post-standing rock world.

I’ll end my official remarks with this mural I saw on the Dutch island of Saba a few years ago. As scientists we can sometimes get caught up in our scientific arguments to protect nature, but let’s not forget that “I love sharks” is an equally valid argument for protecting sharks. Like the Beatles said, all you need is love. Thank you everyone.

If you’d like to continue these discussion, I invite you to the Beyond 30x30 symposium taking place in this room at 10 AM. My colleague Dr Alia Hidayat will present on how CAP plans to propose a Beyond 30x30 framework to the next president. And then we will then continue the discussion with a workshop co-hosted by CAP and Lenfest later today at 3:30.

and if you want to provide advice on developing this beyond 30x30 framework for greater access, equity, and quality of ocean protection in the US, please scan this QR code and take our survey. Thank you everyone.

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