Marine reserve

A marine reserve is a part of a marine territory that is legally protected from fishing or other human economic activities with the aim of protecting marine biodiversity, important environmental processes and genetic resources, as one of the measures to prevent environmental degradation in the marine ecosystem. The concept of a marine reserve should be distinguished from the concept of a marine park. Today, less than 1% of the world's oceans are allocated to marine reserves ^[1] , while all of them are located in relative proximity to land.

Part of the modern Dry Tortugas National Park can be considered the prototype of a marine reserve: on January 4, 1935, US President Franklin Roosevelt reefs near Fort Jefferson were declared the world's first marine protected area. In Europe, the first marine reserve appeared in 1963 as part of the Port Cros National Park near the Hyères resort in France. The first international resolution on the protection of the marine environment was adopted during the First World Conference on National Parks in Seattle in 1962 ^[2] .

In the early 1970s, the United States took the lead in creating national marine reserves and enacting special legislation on this subject; in China, since the late 1980s, a five-year marine reserve program has created seven national marine reserves.

The largest marine reserve in the world is the Phoenix Islands Conservation Area ^[3] . Large marine reserves exist in Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Canada ( National Marine Reserve ), China, Russia ( Far Eastern Marine Reserve ).