- The European Union’s independent auditing body published a report on Oct. 26 that says the bloc is “highly unlikely” to achieve its target of protecting 30% of its marine area by 2030.
- The auditors found that fishing activity is significantly higher in many marine protected areas (MPAs) than in other European waters; the main type of fishing in these MPAs is bottom trawling, a destructive method.
- They also found that many sites face staffing and funding problems; that the EU lacks a standardized way to assess MPA effectiveness; that offshore and deep-sea habitats are underprotected; and that there’s not enough ecological connectivity in the network to form a coherent system.
- In response to the report, the European Commission said it would support EU countries in implementing measures and that projects are underway to improve assessments of MPAs.
The European Union has for many years been a key player in international biodiversity negotiations, pushing hard for the world’s nations to protect 30% of their land and sea by 2030 — known as the 30×30 initiative. Yet a new audit highlights that the EU is itself off track to fulfill this commitment, at least when it comes to its marine environment.
The European Court of Auditors (ECA), the EU’s independent auditing body, published a report on Oct. 26 that says the EU “has not established a marine protected area network that effectively protects the marine environment” and that it’s “highly unlikely” the bloc will meet its 30% target by 2030.
The auditors reported that in the type of EU marine protected area (MPA) that covers the most area, Natura 2000 sites, apparent fishing activity is 72% higher than in other European waters. The vast majority of that fishing effort, about 85%, involved the “most destructive bottom-contact gear,” such as bottom trawls that drag weighted nets, damaging seafloor habitats.
The audit points to a long-standing problem with MPAs in Europe and beyond: Designation doesn’t necessarily lead to meaningful protection. Many are “paper parks” that lack strong rules, management or enforcement.
“The report bolsters the growing criticism of the EU’s ‘paper parks’ — campaigners have been calling out the prevalence of destructive fishing practices, in particular bottom-trawling, within MPAs,” John Condon, lead for marine ecosystems at ClientEarth, a U.K.-headquartered NGO, told Mongabay in an email. ClientEarth is part of an umbrella group of 11 NGOs called MPA Legal Coalition that launched in July; even before the launch, they were taking legal action against EU countries for bottom trawling in MPAs. “Despite EU leaders emphasising the urgency of advancing 30×30 on the global stage … this is not being matched by ambitious implementation and enforcement of that protection here in Europe.”
Off track
Twenty-two of the 27 EU member countries are coastal states. The European waters covered by the audit span roughly 5 million square kilometers (2 million square miles) — larger than the EU’s land area. The audit generally doesn’t cover member states’ overseas territories; France, for example, has made most of its marine 30×30 progress in its vast overseas waters, primarily in the Pacific and Indian oceans, but those designations aren’t counted in the audit’s calculations.
In 2020, the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, adopted a Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 that sets a target of legally protecting 30% of the bloc’s land and sea by 2030. One-third of that is to be strictly protected, which at sea generally means a complete ban on fishing, mining and dredging. These commitments came under the commission that served from 2019-2024, whose environmental agenda was unusually ambitious, leading scholars to dub it the “greenest” commission ever.
In 2022, most of the world’s nations followed suit, committing to the 30×30 framework at the U.N. Biodiversity Conference in Montreal. So far, only about 10% of the global ocean has been designated as protected, with roughly 3.5% “effectively protected” (a loose analog for strictly protected), according to a major NGO-backed report released in September. The EU has pushed for more international implementation: In October, the European Council — comprising the heads of state or government of member states, which sets the EU’s overall political direction and priorities — released a statement saying its focus ahead of the 2026 U.N. biodiversity and climate summits was on “translating commitments into concrete actions.”
Yet the EU isn’t necessarily ahead of the rest of the world: 13.7% of its waters have been designated as MPAs, and less than 1% are strictly protected, according to the audit. The 13.7% figure comes from a 2025 report from the bloc’s European Environment Agency (EEA); the 1% figure comes from a recent report by researchers affiliated with the EEA.
The auditors visited MPA sites, interviewed managers, and analyzed fishing activity, among other types of research. They found that many sites face staffing and funding problems; that the EU lacks a standardized way to assess MPA effectiveness; that offshore and deep-sea habitats are underprotected; and that there’s not enough ecological connectivity in the network to form a coherent system, particularly in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, where many EU MPAs are “ecological islands.”
“Most Mediterranean protected areas are separated by over 100km [62 mi] of heavily exploited waters, preventing the genetic exchange necessary for ecosystem resilience,” the report says.
The ECA used satellite data from Global Fishing Watch, a vessel-tracking platform, to determine that apparent fishing activity was more than 1.5 times higher within Natura 2000 sites than in other European waters between 2020 and 2024. Fishing is legal in many sites.
“The main condition that determines whether an MPA is effective … is the elimination of activities that have the strongest impacts on marine biodiversity, such as bottom trawling,” Joachim Claudet, a researcher at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) who specializes in MPAs, told Mongabay in an email. He pointed to the fact that the IUCN, the global nature conservation authority, has declared activities such as bottom trawling incompatible with marine protection. “But in many European countries, we still believe they are [compatible], or pretend they are.”
Claudet added that the audit’s findings were consistent with the scientific literature.
Iliana Ivanova, the ECA member who led the audit, told Mongabay in an emailed statement that “a protected area needs clear conservation objectives, appropriate measures to address harmful activities, effective management, dependable resources and monitoring that informs decisions. Our audit found weaknesses across that chain. The broader message is therefore not simply that Europe needs to protect more sea, but that it must make protection work below the surface, rather than measure success primarily by boundaries on a map.”
In response to the audit, an unnamed spokesperson for the European Commission told Mongabay in an emailed statement that “Member States are responsible for implementing measures and achieving targets set in EU law. The Commission will continue to support them with technical, financial and policy support, as needed.”
The spokesperson said the commission has allocated 1.6 million euros ($1.8 million) to the LIFE-PAME Europe project to improve assessment of MPA effectiveness, and will use the resulting methodology to develop a digital reporting tool that allows for comparable assessments.
The auditors recommended that the EU streamline the process for adopting conservation measures, including fisheries restrictions, within MPAs. Few such rules have been issued since the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) took effect in 2013, according to the audit. The CFP dictates that fishing restrictions must generally be agreed to by all countries that have a fishing interest in the area — a contentious and time-consuming process that’s caused frustration among conservationists.
However, many conservation NGOs support the Common Fisheries Policy and don’t want it to be opened up for reform for fear that other environmental policies within it will be rolled back. The European Commission announced on Nov. 4 that, for now, it won’t open the CFP for reform, despite interest from the fishing industry and the European Parliament, the EU’s legislative branch.
In its report, the ECA didn’t take a position on whether the priority should be expanding the MPA network or strengthening the MPAs that already exist.
“We have not ranked expansion and management as competing challenges: both are indispensable,” Ivanova, the auditor, told Mongabay. “Expanding the map without the capacity to manage new sites would reproduce existing weaknesses, while improving only current sites would leave important habitats unprotected.”
For his part, Claudet, the researcher in France, said “let’s start by making our MPAs, one by one, true MPAs, before thinking about making more of them.”
Banner image: A 126-meter (413-foot), Dutch-flagged industrial fishing vessel in the Flanders Banks, a set of sandbanks off France and Belgium, in November 2024. There are two MPAs in Flanders Bank; both allow industrial fishing. Image © Lorraine Turci/Greenpeace.
Lawsuit is latest push to curb bottom trawling in protected European waters
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