The European Court of Auditors warned this Monday that the European Union is still far from meeting the goal of preserving 30% of its marine waters by 2030. Currently, around 14% of the community marine area is listed as a protected zone, but a significant part of these spaces lacks effective conservation measures, which is why the body sees it as "unlikely" to meet the environmental commitments set for the end of this decade.
These conclusions are included in a report released by the European auditors, who point out that less than 1% of EU waters enjoys strict protection, well below the 10% planned for 2030. The document also emphasizes that merely declaring an area as protected does not automatically imply restrictions on potentially harmful activities, such as fishing, which is only limited in a small fraction of these zones.
"The EU has made some progress in the designation of marine protected areas, but our audit shows that the real challenge is to turn the designation into real protection," said the member of the Court responsible for the report, Iliana Ivanova, who urges to accelerate the adoption of measures to achieve tangible results in the conservation of marine ecosystems.
The auditors remind that community legislation provides procedures to locate and declare these spaces, but they point out that no homogeneous criteria have been established to define what activities can be authorized in them or what limitations should be imposed to avoid damage to the marine environment.
The absence of harmonized rules causes the level of protection to differ between member states and even between enclaves integrated into the "Natura 2000" network. At the same time, the European Commission lacks a unified system to verify whether the measures applied are achieving conservation objectives.
One of the most relevant problems highlighted in the report is related to fishing. Extractive activities and those that degrade the seabed constitute, according to the Court, one of the main threats to biodiversity. However, the adoption of restrictions can take years when they affect fleets from several countries, which delays effective protection.
The auditors admit that these decisions require complex negotiations between the involved States, but they insist that it is essential to strengthen cooperation so that the declaration of protected areas translates into "concrete and binding measures."
Deficiencies in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic
The report also questions how protected spaces are distributed, finding that they do not form a sufficiently connected network that facilitates the movement of species and the recovery of ecosystems, especially in deep waters and those far from the coast.
In particular, the Court observes that numerous protected enclaves in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic act as "ecological islands." In the Mediterranean Sea, moreover, most of these areas are separated by more than 100 kilometers of waters with intense human pressure, complicating the exchange of species and the preservation of biodiversity.
To these shortcomings are added obstacles of funding and personnel, which hinder the effective implementation of conservation plans, as well as the absence of systematic monitoring that allows assessing whether the measures taken are truly improving the state of marine ecosystems.
According to the auditors, the European funds allocated to these areas are distributed among various programs and national budgets, which prevents knowing precisely how much money is dedicated to their protection and makes it difficult to ensure stable resources for their long-term management.
The Court also warns that conservation decisions do not always adequately consider their economic and social repercussions, especially on coastal communities and the fishing sector. Therefore, it calls for greater involvement of the affected stakeholders and the implementation of measures that mitigate the possible negative impacts on their activities.
In light of this diagnosis, the auditors recommend that the European Commission work closely with the Member States to improve the coordination of protected areas, accelerate the approval of necessary restrictions, and create common mechanisms that allow assessing their effectiveness, with the aim of implementing these improvements before the end of 2029.