Six Marine Protected Areas Recognised as Blue Parks at Our Ocean Conference, Four From Africa

The Marine Conservation Institute recognised six marine protected areas as Blue Parks at the Our Ocean conference in Mombasa on 16 June 2026, honouring sites in Madagascar, Senegal, Chile, and Canada whose management has been assessed as durable, equitable, and effective at protecting marine life. The awards, announced before more than 6,000 delegates from governments, nonprofits, the private sector, and other institutions, reflect a growing consensus that the 30 by 30 target under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework requires meaningful protection rather than purely symbolic designation.

 

The Six Awardees and Their Governance Models

 

The 2026 Blue Park cohort spans an extraordinary range of scales and governance arrangements. The Rapa Nui Marine Protected Area in Chile covers more than 700,000 square kilometres encompassing the entire exclusive economic zone of Easter Island and Motu Motiro Hiva, and is now managed jointly by Indigenous island communities and the Chilean government following a contested establishment process. Kawawana Indigenous Community Heritage Area in Senegal secures coastal and estuarine ecosystems including mangrove forests, tidal channels, and mudflats along the Casamance River, established in 2008 through a community-led initiative by a fishers' collective and formally recognised as an ICCA in 2010. Canada's Banc-des-Américains MPA is co-managed by the federal government, Québec provincial government, and Mi'kmaq First Nations on whose ancestral seas it sits, with the communities having been involved from the area's creation in 2019. Madagascar contributes three awardees: Nosy Hara National Park, the country's largest sea turtle nesting site covering more than 1,000 square kilometres; Sahamalaza-Iles Radama National Park, home to all of Madagascar's mangrove species alongside whale sharks and dugongs; and Nosy Tanihely National Park, a compact site of less than five square kilometres that is the only fully self-financed protected area in Madagascar, funded entirely through tourist entry fees.

 

Community Governance as a Defining Feature

 

A common thread across all six awardees is meaningful co-management with Indigenous peoples and local communities, a characteristic that the Marine Conservation Institute has identified as central to the durability and effectiveness that Blue Park status recognises. Rapa Nui Ocean Council executive coordinator Ludovic Burns Tuki articulated the cultural dimension of this governance model at the awards ceremony, describing the MPA as protecting not only species, ecosystems, and ecological processes but also the culture and way of life of the island's people and their relationship with the ocean. At Kawawana, customary governance systems and traditional fishing practices are woven into the management framework through the ICCA designation, providing legal recognition for community-led conservation that predates formal government involvement. In Madagascar, community members participate in patrols, ecological monitoring, and awareness-building across both Nosy Hara and Sahamalaza-Iles Radama, demonstrating that effective marine management can be distributed across state and community institutions rather than centralised in government agencies alone.

 

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Financing as the Central Challenge

 

Fatou Ndoye, executive secretary of the Abidjan Convention at the United Nations Environment Programme, has articulated the financing challenge with precision, noting that designating protected areas is only the first step and that effective management requires long-term investment in institutions, science, monitoring, enforcement, and community engagement. Nosy Tanihely's self-financing model through tourist entry fees represents one of the more commercially innovative approaches to MPA sustainability, providing financial autonomy from government budgets and international donor cycles that many parks remain dependent on. Sahamalaza-Iles Radama is partly financed through the Foundation for Protected Areas and Biodiversity of Madagascar, a private trust that channels investment returns from endowment funds to conservation, illustrating how blended finance mechanisms can provide more stable funding than annual government appropriations. Ndoye's framing of success as measured not by square kilometres on a map but by effective management, adequate financing, ecological connectivity, and tangible benefits for biodiversity and coastal communities provides the benchmark against which the broader 30 by 30 target should be evaluated.

 

Context Within the Global 30 by 30 Framework

 

The Blue Park Awards, launched in 2017 and awarded annually, now recognise 40 MPAs covering a combined 4.2 million square kilometres of marine estate across 30 countries and Indigenous territories. The 2026 cohort adds to this network at a moment when the political momentum around 30 by 30 is generating rapid expansion of protected area designations that conservation experts warn may not always translate into meaningful protection. Marine Conservation Institute president Lance Morgan has described the six awardees as a powerful reminder of what the 30 by 30 goal actually requires, framing them as evidence that effective marine protection is achievable across cultures, geographies, and political systems when governance structures, community engagement, and financing are aligned. For the ocean economy sectors most directly affected by MPA designation, including fisheries, tourism, and aquaculture, the Blue Park framework's emphasis on durable and equitable management provides a more commercially predictable operating environment than poorly enforced designations that create regulatory uncertainty without delivering ecological benefits.