Placing a marine area under protection is a legal act. The indicators in this domain measure the extent of that act — not the effectiveness of the protection.
Protected area designation
Open download
Connected
Share of marine protected area — WDPA / WD-OECM
Legal instrument
Convention on Biological Diversity · Kunming-Montreal Global Framework Target 3 (30% by 2030) · SDG 14.5
What is counted
The percentage of a country’s territorial waters and maritime jurisdiction legally designated as protected areas
Unit
% of marine area
Coverage
2013–2025 · 174 countries
Publisher
UNEP-WCMC and IUCN (Protected Planet WDPA / WD-OECM) · compiled by the World Bank · Our World in Data
Sample value from the publisher’s release
2,223 observations loaded to the platform · Türkiye 2013: 1.2%
Measures designated extent, not protection effectiveness. DISCLAIMER (Scientific Use & Turkish Maritime Jurisdiction / Blue Homeland): Included strictly for scientific/academic research. The VLIZ Marine Regions polygons used by UNEP-WCMC/WDPA as the spatial denominator, as well as any unilateral "Marine Park / Natura 2000" designations infringing upon Türkiye’s continental shelf in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, are null and void for the Republic of Türkiye. Official UN-registered Mavi Vatan boundaries (~462,000 km², A/74/757) prevail exclusively.
Protected Planet / WDPA — protection status detail (IUCN category, governance type, area geometry)
Bulk download of the detailed records and API access require registration and a key; sources demanding credentials are not connected here. The country-level coverage percentage IS connected, via the World Bank compilation; only the site-level detail remains closed.
Global Fishing Watch — AIS-based fishing effort
API access requires a token.
IMO GISIS — casualty and incident records
The non-public modules require an account, and no machine-readable export of the public subset is published.
