Bangladesh declared two new marine protected areas. What about the first five?

On June 2, the Bangladesh Gazette formally declared Kuakata and Salimpur as marine protected areas, linking them to a target to raise fisheries exports to $1 billion by 2030 through deep-sea tuna fishing, seaweed cultivation, and modern ports. With these gazette notifications, Bangladesh now has seven nationally declared marine protected or marine reserve areas, and the announcement has been presented as a milestone for the country’s blue economy. However, before we celebrate the number, one question deserves an honest answer: what has actually happened in the five that came before?

It is a fair question, because the gap between declaring a marine protected area (MPA) and running one is enormous, and it is exactly where good intentions tend to disappear. An MPA is a stretch of sea where fishing and other extractive activities are restricted so that depleted fish populations can recover and habitats survive. Done properly, the benefits are not only ecological. Fish multiply inside the protected boundary and spill over into surrounding waters, raising catches for the fishers working nearby. This is why MPAs are treated worldwide as economic infrastructure, not merely conservation, and why they sit at the centre of any serious blue economy.

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But Bangladesh’s record here is not reassuring. The Middle Ground and South Patches reserve has existed since 2000, yet more than two decades later, there is little public information on whether it has protected a single spawning ground. The Swatch of No Ground, declared in 2014, and Saint Martin’s Island, declared in 2022, still report illegal monofilament gill-netting inside their boundaries. Of all the existing sites, only Nijhum Dwip has a published management plan, introduced in 2021, and even its financing and implementation remain unclear. For most of these areas, the honest summary is that we know they were declared, and we know very little about what they have done since.

This is the condition conservationists call a paper park: a protected area that exists in the gazette and on the map but not in the water, because it has no management plan, no enforcement budget, no monitoring and no involvement from the people who fish there. The marine group WildAid puts it plainly: designating an MPA without investing in rangers, surveillance, and community engagement leaves little more than lines on a map. If five of Bangladesh’s MPAs are already closer to lines on a map than to functioning reserves, then adding a sixth and seventh does not multiply our success. It only increases the unfinished work.

There is another reason why celebrating the declaration of two new MPAs is premature. The seven areas are being counted against an old benchmark. For years, the international target was to protect 10 percent of marine space, set under the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Aichi Target 11 for 2020. That deadline has passed, and the goal has been revised upwards. The 2022 Kunming-Montreal framework, which Bangladesh has signed, now commits countries to conserving 30 percent of their marine areas by 2030. So even on the arithmetic, reaching towards 10 percent is not an arrival. It is the third of a journey whose deadline is only a few years away.

None of this is an argument against Kuakata and Salimpur. It is an argument for treating their declaration as the beginning of the work rather than the end of it, and the example of what that work looks like is not far away. In the central Philippines, the small island of Apo set aside less than a 10th of its fishing grounds as a no-take sanctuary in 1982 and enforced it with a single guard watching from the beach on a rotating roster among local fishing families. Over the following years, scientists from Silliman University recorded fish biomass inside the reserve rising several times over, and that abundance spilled across the boundary into the waters where the community still fished. Today, Apo is ranked among the world’s finest dive sites, and tourism and fishing together sustain the island. The decisive factor was never the size of the area or the wording of the declaration. It was the follow-through: local ownership, modest funding, and patient, consistent enforcement.

That is the agenda Bangladesh now owes its seven MPAs. Each needs a published, site-specific management plan that plainly says which zones are closed, which activities are seasonal, and who is responsible for enforcing the rules. Each needs a real budget for rangers, patrol boats, and monitoring, because enforcement without resources is theatre. Marine governance, currently scattered across the Department of Fisheries, Department of Environment, Forest Department, coast guard, navy, and the local government, needs a single coordinating authority so that responsibilities don’t fall through the gaps. Above all, coastal fishers, who know the spawning seasons better than any ministry and who pay the first cost of every restriction, must be brought in as partners through co-management and alternative livelihoods, not treated as offenders to be policed.

The economic stakes make this urgent rather than optional. Bangladesh’s ambition of raising fisheries exports through deep-sea tuna fishing, seaweed cultivation, and modern ports rests entirely on a healthy sea. Fish stocks that are allowed to collapse, reefs that are left to die, and coastal waters that are left to choke on pollution will not export anything worth a billion dollars. The protected areas are not a charitable side-project to the blue economy. They are its foundation, and a foundation left unbuilt cannot hold the weight that is being promised on top of it.

Bangladesh fought hard at international tribunals to win its place in the Bay of Bengal, and declaring seven protected areas shows that the ambition is real. But ambition was never the missing piece; execution was. The June 2 notification has given us two more lines on the map. Whether those lines, and the five drawn before them, come to mean anything will depend on the unglamorous work that began the day after the gazette was printed, and on this timeline, the country can no longer afford to declare a protected area and then look away.

Md Syful Islam is a PhD research fellow in the Department of Maritime, Transport Law and Politics at Ankara University in Türkiye. He can be reached at syful@ankara.edu.tr.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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