New Caledonia has designated an additional 7.6% of its vast Pacific exclusive economic zone as highly protected ocean, bringing the total area where industrial fishing, drilling, and mining are banned to 10% of its 502,000-square-mile marine territory.
At a glance
- Marine protected area: New Caledonia’s Natural Park of the Coral Sea covers 502,000 square miles of the western Pacific — one of the largest marine parks on Earth — but only 2.4% had been strictly protected until now.
- Coral Sea expansion: The October 2023 C.E. designation adds 7.6% of the exclusive economic zone to the highly protected category, pushing the total to 10% and prohibiting industrial activity across that area.
- Kanak communities: Indigenous Kanak peoples participated directly in shaping the new protections, with their vision of the ocean formally integrated into the governing decree.
A decade in the making
New Caledonia, an overseas territory of France in the western Pacific, created the Natural Park of the Coral Sea about a decade before this expansion — designating its entire exclusive economic zone as a marine protected area. That was a significant gesture on paper. In practice, only 2.4% of the park carried strict protections. Industrial operations could proceed across the remaining 97.6%.
The October 18, 2023 C.E. decree changed that math. By adding 7.6 percentage points of highly protected coverage, New Caledonia crossed the 10% threshold that places it among only nine countries — including France itself — that have achieved that level of strict marine protection within their exclusive economic zones.
“By designating 10% of the park as highly protected, the government has started to uphold the commitment it made when establishing the park nearly a decade ago,” said Giuseppe Di Carlo, director of the Pew Bertarelli Ocean Legacy Project, which helped develop the new protections. “Progress has been slow — and there is still much to do — but this important step forward will help preserve New Caledonia’s marine environment for ocean life, the local community, and future generations.”
What the new zones protect
The newly designated areas shelter migratory corridors and habitat for whales, sea turtles, sharks, dolphins, and seabirds. They also protect ecologically significant coral reefs, seamounts, and a deep-sea trench that descends more than 23,000 feet — among the deepest points in the Pacific.
That depth matters. Deep-sea ecosystems are among the slowest to recover from disturbance, and keeping industrial operations out of these zones gives their communities of life a genuine chance to persist. For the coral reefs closer to the surface, strict protection reduces chronic stressors like trawling and runoff from extraction activities — making reefs more resilient to the warming that is their primary long-term threat.
New Caledonia’s decision is also part of the broader Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which calls on nations to place 30% of the world’s ocean under protection by 2030 C.E. Right now, only about 8.2% of the global ocean is protected in any form, and just 2.9% carries the kind of strict protection that actually limits industrial use, according to the Marine Protection Atlas. The gap between those two figures — 8.2% nominally protected versus 2.9% meaningfully protected — illustrates why the quality of protection matters as much as its extent.
How collaboration shaped the outcome
New Caledonia’s government did not design the expansion alone. Negotiators brought together the fishing industry, environmental NGOs, and Indigenous Kanak communities — groups whose interests do not always align — to reach an agreement that all parties could accept.
“This collaborative work was necessary so that the balance of the park was preserved,” said Jeremie Katidjo Monnier, New Caledonia’s minister of the environment. “The Oceanian dimension, with the Kanak vision of the ocean, was integrated into the decree.”
That integration is more than symbolic. The Kanak people have lived alongside these waters for thousands of years and hold cultural relationships with marine species and places that formal conservation science does not always capture. Embedding their perspective into the legal framework means the protections are grounded in both ecological data and long-standing human knowledge of this specific ocean.
This expansion is one of many ocean and marine protection milestones building momentum toward the 30×30 goal worldwide.
The work still ahead
Ten percent is a milestone, not a finish line. New Caledonia’s own commitment when the Natural Park of the Coral Sea was created implied that strict protections would grow — and 10% still leaves 90% of its EEZ open to some form of industrial use. The Kunming-Montreal target is 30%, and at current global rates, reaching that figure by 2030 C.E. will require far more nations to make far larger commitments than most have announced so far.
Di Carlo’s own statement acknowledged the pace: “Progress has been slow.” Enforcement across 502,000 square miles of open ocean is also a practical challenge that no designation resolves on its own. Monitoring, patrol capacity, and clear penalties for violations will determine whether the lines drawn on a map translate into actual protection for the turtles, sharks, and deep-sea communities the decree names.
Still, the expansion demonstrates that the political and logistical barriers to meaningful ocean protection are not insurmountable — and that bringing Indigenous knowledge and industry into the same room, rather than around it, can produce agreements with broader legitimacy and longer shelf lives.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Mongabay
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Papua New Guinea establishes the Western Manus Marine Protected Area
- Samoa commits to protecting 30% of its ocean
- The Good News for Humankind archive on marine conservation
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