Towards a Regional MPA Network in the South China Sea: General Perspectives and Specific Challenges

Abstract

The South China Sea has many important habitats and species that are under serious threat and require urgent measures for preservation. The Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, to which all coastal countries in the SCS are parties, calls for the establishment of networks of marine protected areas covering at least 10 percent of the coastal and marine areas of the world by 2020. Since the coverage of in the SCS and Gulf of Thailand Large Marine Ecosystems in 2009 was respectively only 0.31 and 0.8 percent, far lower than the 10 percent objective. This article studies the general prospect for the establishment of a regional network of marine protected areas in the South China Sea and potential legal and political challenges of such an endeavor.