At the close of the One Ocean Summit in Brest on Friday 11 February, Emmanuel Macron announced the extension of the French Southern Territories nature reserve, which will become the second largest marine protected area in the world.
France's first marine protected area was created in 1963 in the Port-Cros National Park in the Var department. It takes half an hour to get to the island of Port-Cros from the port of Le Lavandou. Eric, an electrician, works on the island. As an amateur fisherman, he confirms that the benefits of the marine protected area can be seen with the naked eye: "You have big sea bream, big sars, bass... In other ports, you see small ones, but not big ones."
A "life-size aquarium
There are more fish, and they are bigger too. To see this, you have to go underwater. "In some areas, divers have the impression of being in a sort of life-size aquarium", explains Charles-François Boudouresque, professor of oceanography and member of the scientific council of the Port-Cros National Park. This is what he calls the "reserve effect": "It can obviously be the reappearance of species that have disappeared elsewhere, rare species. This was the case with the grouper, which had practically disappeared from Port-Cros and has reappeared.
"There's also the export aspect. We have a kind of machine that produces eggs and larvae. With the currents, all of this is carried to outside areas and therefore contributes to repopulation well beyond the boundaries of the marine protected area."
Charles-François Boudouresque, Professor of Oceanography
A restricted fishing zone that is too small
Port-Cros is a small jewel of biodiversity, but the areas where all forms of fishing are banned represent a tiny fraction. Alexandre Meinesz, professor emeritus of marine biology at the Université Côte d'Azur, deplores this: "A true marine reserve that protects all biodiversity is one where the main factor destabilising ecosystems is banned, i.e. fishing. However, when we combine the no-take zones on all the French coasts of the Mediterranean, we see that this represents 0.6 % of the territory, so almost nothing is protected."
To achieve France's target of 10% of strong protection of territorial waters by 2030, we will have to redouble our efforts, allocating resources to reinforce patrols in particular, and getting fishermen to accept these new bans.
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