Analysis of Progress Towards a Comprehensive System of Marine Protected Areas in Brazil

Brazilian marine ecosystems face great threats while retaining outstanding biological features. A gap analysis was conducted to evaluate how well marine protected areas (MPAs) in Brazil meet conservation objectives for representation, connectivity, and risk-spreading. The performance of the MPAs was evaluated by overlaying maps of ecosystem and management and calculating the size of no-take areas and the distances between them. All objectives were far from fully attained. Currently, the protection of the marine environment is poor, with less than 1.9% of Brazil's marine jurisdiction within MPAs and 0.14% within no-take areas. Also, only 23% of the ecosystems met the minimal number of replicates required by the risk-spreading objective. More positively, just over half (51%) of the no-take areas are a desirable distance apart. Our study highlights that a systematic expansion of MPAs in Brazil is urgently needed to move toward an ecologically representative and functioning MPA system.