Africa’s marine protected areas promise much. Delivering on that promise is another matter.
By Our Staff Writer
THE INDIAN OCEAN off the Kenyan coast is a place of considerable ecological wealth. Coral reefs cascade across roughly 630 square kilometres of the country’s coastal waters, sheltering parrotfish, sea turtles, Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins and humpback whales. Those same reefs, and the mangrove forests that fringe them, generate livelihoods for hundreds of thousands of artisanal fishers working the 536-kilometre shoreline. The broader Western Indian Ocean region produces a gross marine product estimated at over $20 billion annually, with coastal tourism, fisheries and carbon sequestration among the principal contributors.
The instrument charged with protecting this inheritance is the marine protected area, often referred to as an MPA, a geographically defined zone in which human activity is legally constrained in the interest of conservation. Kenya established two of the earliest such zones on the African continent. Watamu Marine National Park was gazetted in 1968; Malindi Marine National Park followed shortly thereafter. The surrounding Watamu-Malindi Marine National Reserve was declared a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1979. Half a century on, those designations remain in force, managed by the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), which oversees five national marine parks and reserves in total, including Mombasa, Kisite-Mpunguti and Kiunga.
Yet designation and protection are not synonymous. Research assessing the management effectiveness of the Malindi-Watamu complex found that the no-take marine parks were making measurable progress towards biodiversity conservation, while the adjacent marine reserves, where fishing is regulated rather than prohibited, were less effective at sustaining community livelihoods. Governance structures showed the weakest trends of all.
That tension between ecological aspiration and institutional reality runs through marine conservation across the continent.
A global deficit, an African dimension
According to the Protected Planet Report 2024, prepared by the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, only 8.4 per cent of the world’s marine and coastal areas are currently within documented protected or conserved areas. The target under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, agreed by nearly 200 nations in 2022, is 30 per cent by 2030.
The ambition is explicit in global policy language:
“Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.”
— United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 14
Closing the gap between present coverage and that target would require designating a marine area larger than the Indian Ocean within six years.
Africa’s contribution to this shortfall is significant. The Western Indian Ocean region, stretching from Somalia to South Africa, has declared 143 MPAs covering approximately 550,000 square kilometres, or seven per cent of the combined exclusive economic zones of its coastal states. About 63 per cent of that protection was established only after the UN adopted the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. Progress, in other words, has been recent and unevenly distributed.
Kenya’s own Exclusive Economic Zone spans approximately 142,000 square kilometres. Its six MPAs, comprising both national parks and reserves, cover a fraction of that area. Its coral reefs are classified as Endangered under the Red List of Ecosystems, with ongoing decline in coral cover attributable to bleaching, overfishing and pollution. The 1997-98 El Niño-related bleaching event caused what researchers identified as the greatest single measurable impact on the reef communities of Malindi and Watamu, from which recovery has been partial and precarious.
The spillover dividend
The economic case for MPAs has strengthened considerably in recent years. A 2024 study spanning 25 countries found that fishery benefits adjacent to protected areas were detected in 90 per cent of the MPAs examined, including increased catch volumes in 76 per cent of cases. No evidence of net costs to fisheries was recorded anywhere.
The mechanism is “spillover”, meaning the dispersal of fish and larvae from protected zones into adjacent fished waters. A December 2024 study published in Science, analysing nine large-scale MPAs across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, found that spillover produced a 12 to 18 per cent increase in catch-per-unit-of-fishing-effort in waters near protected areas.
Juan Carlos Villaseñor-Derbez, an assistant professor at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School, said in the study’s accompanying commentary:
“Well-enforced no-take zones can generate measurable ecological benefits that extend beyond their boundaries.”
In Kenya, early evidence of this dynamic was documented at Malindi and Watamu. Research on catch-per-unit-effort using traditional fish traps placed across park boundaries found that for most species, catch rates were higher within the parks, in some cases by an order of magnitude, than outside them. The implication is that functional no-take zones are not simply conservation instruments; they are also, in effect, fisheries management tools that subsidise adjacent artisanal catches.
The Kenya Wildlife Service manages these areas as ecologically productive systems expected to restore reefs, improve tourism revenues and generate fish spillover to fished reefs. Management, however, has frequently been constrained by limited access to scientific findings and insufficient capacity to translate research into operational decisions.
Paper parks and enforcement gaps
A protected area that exists only on paper offers little ecological benefit. This is the central critique levelled at MPA regimes across sub-Saharan Africa, and Kenya is not immune to it.
Effective MPA enforcement must address illegal fishing, poaching and habitat destruction. Along Kenya’s coast, enforcement capacity has historically been stretched. Night fishing within park boundaries, the use of destructive gear such as beach seine nets, and the poaching of sea turtles and shells remain persistent problems.
A Strategic Adaptive Management programme, developed collaboratively by KWS, Tanzania’s Marine Parks Authority, the Western Indian Ocean Marine Science Association and California Polytechnic State University, has sought to change this by reorienting MPA staff from reactive enforcement towards active reef management.
Community co-management offers a complementary route. Kenya’s Beach Management Units (BMUs) are the legal mechanism through which artisanal fishers participate in governing their coastal stretches. The Ministry of Fisheries has formalised this arrangement, with BMUs engaged as equal partners in coastal resource management. Kenya’s 2024 Marine Fisheries Regulations explicitly provide for monitoring, control and surveillance mechanisms to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing within the country’s marine waters.
The Locally Managed Marine Area (LMMA) movement, which began at Kuruwitu on Kenya’s north coast in 2005, provides evidence that community-led conservation can work. Twelve years after a 30-hectare no-take zone was set aside, fish abundance, size and diversity had improved, and more than 20 similar community projects had followed its example.
Against the clock
Despite these efforts, the arithmetic of the 30-by-30 target remains daunting. Progress has stalled since 2020. Fewer than 2 per cent of marine protected areas globally have been formally assessed for management effectiveness, rendering headline coverage figures largely uninformative about actual conservation outcomes.
Africa’s coral reefs face compounding pressures that no amount of designation alone can resolve. Sea surface temperatures have reached record highs, with over 90 per cent of the ocean having experienced heatwave conditions at some point during 2023. In Watamu and Malindi, where periodic bleaching events have already restructured reef communities, this is not an abstraction.
What the Kenyan experience demonstrates is that governance architecture matters as much as geography. A no-take zone with functioning enforcement, community buy-in and adaptive management produces measurable ecological and economic returns. One without those ingredients is a line on a map. With 2030 approaching, the distinction between the two has never been more consequential.
