French Polynesia Creates World’s Largest Marine Protected Area

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1. **From TIME:**

   French Polynesia announced the creation of the world’s largest Marine Protected Area (MPA), at [the U.N. Ocean Conference](https://time.com/7292295/whats-at-stake-un-global-ocean-conference/) in France on Monday. The MPA will cover the entirety of the country’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), almost 5 million square kilometers (more than 1.9 million square miles) and will restrict extractive practices like deep-sea mining and bottom-trawling, a destructive type of fishing that drags large nets along the seafloor. Of that 5 million, 1.1 million square kilometers (424,712 square miles) will be designated as a highly or fully protected area, known as class 1 and 2, where only traditional coastal fishing, ecotourism, and scientific exploration, will be allowed. The government has also pledged to add an additional 500,000 square kilometers (193, 051 square miles) to the highly protected area by World Ocean Day 2026.

   “We have been managing this EEZ wisely for centuries, using the techniques that were passed on from the generations before us and our ancestors,” French Polynesia’s President, Moetai Brotherson, told TIME. “But now we wanted to take a bold step to be in line with the international standards of the [International Union for Conservation of Nature] IUCN.”

2. Hopefully, other countries will follow through. Proud to see that my country can sometimes make the right decisions regarding the environment even if we should always be skeptical of what will really happen in terms of monitoring and logistics to make sure it stays pristine.

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