Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) reduce fishing pressure and restore ecosystems, with significant welfare benefits for marine animals. Expanding and properly enforcing MPAs is among the highest-impact marine welfare interventions.
Well-enforced Marine Protected Areas deliver direct and indirect welfare benefits to marine animals at scale. The most direct benefit is reduced fishing mortality — fewer fish, invertebrates, and megafauna suffer capture, bycatch injury, and slaughter within protected zones. Indirect benefits include recovery of prey populations that improves nutritional welfare of predatory species, reduction in habitat degradation that impairs migration and reproduction, and reduced noise and vessel disturbance that causes stress in acoustically sensitive species like cetaceans. The welfare and conservation cases for expanding MPAs are aligned — increasing the protected area of the ocean is among the most impactful marine animal welfare interventions available at policy level.