Elevate Successful Marine Protected Areas

Nominate MPAs for the 2025 Blue Park Awards

Thirty awarded Blue Parks around the globe are revitalizing marine ecosystems, rebuilding threatened populations, providing food security for coastal communities, building climate resilience, and inspiring us to follow their lead!

Remote, coastal reefs, rich with the colors of endemic and threatened corals, lush mangrove forests that shelter juvenile fish from predators and coastal communities from storm surges, and nutrient-rich subtidal rocky reefs supporting diverse food webs – these are just a few examples of the vital marine ecosystems protected in the world’s Blue Parks. Blue Parks are championed by communities, conservationists, governments, and scientists that have embraced our collective responsibility to the ocean that sustains such diversity of life on our blue planet.

So how does an MPA become a ‘Blue Park’?

Blue Parks are marine protected areas (MPAs) that meet rigorous science-based criteria for conservation effectiveness. MPAs that achieve the Blue Park Standard are awarded and celebrated at high-level international meetings like the UN Ocean Conference or the Our Ocean Conference.

The Blue Park Standard provides a critical benchmark for MPA quality that supports real progress toward the global 30x30 target. The Standard is defined by science-based criteria covering six critical components of conservation effectiveness:

Location & Design: Blue Parks are effectively designed to protect areas of the ocean that are significant to marine biodiversity. They contribute to the representation of ecosystems and ecological connectivity

Equitable Governance: Equitable governance that involves Indigenous and community consultation and engagement lays the foundation for durable protection with high compliance in Blue Parks.

Adaptive Management: Effective conservation management requires identifying threats, setting targets, planning management activities to mitigate threats and achieve targets, and measuring outcomes to inform future targets and management activities.

Strong Protection: Blue Parks are fully or highly protected from damaging human activities, including bottom trawling and industrial scale fishing, oil and gas extraction, and dredging.

High Compliance: Blue Parks employ a variety of compliance strategies appropriate to their ecological and political contexts as well as to the threats they face. These strategies engage and educate users as well as enforce regulations.

Capacity for Implementation: Blue Parks have enduring staffing, resources, and partnerships to implement management plans and compliance strategies.

These are the attributes of successful Blue Parks that produce conservation benefits – Marine Conservation Institute is working to ensure that they become the standard for all MPAs so that our efforts to achieve biodiversity conservation with 30×30 are meaningful.

Explore the Blue Park Standard

MPAs that don’t yet meet the standard may choose to collaborate with Marine Conservation Institute as a Blue Spark project working toward achieving the standard.

MPA managers, partners, scientists, and supporters can nominate an MPA for a Blue Park Award. Our Blue Parks team evaluates all nominated MPAs, in consultation with the MPA’s management team, and provides a report, along with public comments, to our Science Council, a group of over 30 leading marine scientists from across the globe who decide award status. MPAs that meet Blue Park Standard are awarded and join a network of outstanding ocean leaders.

Blue Park Awards provide much needed recognition to countless scientists, managers, rangers, politicians, conservationists, and local champions who pour their hearts into designing and managing effective MPAs. In addition to this honor, the Blue Park Award comes with a cash prize, thanks to sponsorship by Blue , as well as communications support, funding leverage, and entry into a growing community of MPA managers and experts committed to ocean conservation.

Do you know an MPA that deserves recognition as a Blue Park? Please consider nominating an outstanding MPA for a Blue Park Award to honor its strong protection of marine ecosystems and biodiversity.

The Blue Parks team is considering nominations on a rolling basis, so please submit your nomination as soon as possible! The last possible date to submit a nomination for the 2025 Blue Parks Awards is 31 October 2024. We’re looking forward to celebrating the world’s most effective MPAs with you!

To nominate an MPA for a Blue Park Award, please visit https://marine-conservation.org/blueparks/nominate