What comes to mind when you hear the term “Marine Protected Area”?
Do you picture rich hues of deep blue and green – where vast schools of fish weave through kelp forests, seabirds dive from above, and pods of dolphins, porpoises, and seals thrive in protected waters?
Or do you picture hulking vessels leaking oil and vacuuming up hundreds of thousands of fish? Metal gear scraping the seafloor, ripping through ancient habitats, and stirring up plumes of sediment. Maimed seabirds tangled in giant nets. Dead porpoises, dolphins, seals and sharks, asphyxiated and discarded as bycatch.
What if I told you that the reality of our “protected” waters looks far more like the second image than the first?
British Marine Protected Areas are shamefully underprotected
You’d be forgiven for assuming that Marine Protected Areas actually offer some protections for ocean life.
But astonishingly, in the UK it’s completely legal for massive commercial vessels to operate freely in most ‘Marine Protected Areas’ – including the most destructive kinds.
Bottom trawling is one of them. This is where ships drag giant weighted nets across the ocean floor, indiscriminately scooping up marine life and leaving a mauled mess where a rich, biodiverse seabed used to be.
In 2025 alone, trawlers and dredgers logged the time-equivalent of over 13 years of non-stop fishing inside the UK’s offshore MPAs.
The specific Southern North Sea MPA that I write this from – while floating aboard the Arctic Sunrise off the UK’s East coast – was set up to protect the harbour porpoise, a shy, small cetacean species that relies on these waters for nearly a fifth of its UK population.
But it’s hard to find any real protection here: it remains, by a mile, the most heavily bottom-trawled offshore MPA in the UK.
With no restrictions on bottom trawling, the harbour porpoise – supposedly ‘protected’ in these waters – instead faces a barrage of daily threats. This includes the immediate threat of death by bycatch, noise pollution, weakened visibility, habitat destruction, and critically, the mass depletion of the prey these mammals rely on for feeding and survival.
That’s why we’re here
We’d never accept this kind of destruction in our national parks on land – like Dartmoor or the Peak District. Imagine the outrage if hundreds of bulldozers were allowed to tear through those landscapes on a weekly basis: razing historic landscapes in a matter of seconds, killing otters and bats and badgers like it’s nothing.
But this is exactly what’s happening out of sight, at sea. And we’re here to put a stop to it.
The Arctic Sunrise team has been busy placing these boulders – each weighing up to two tonnes – onto the ocean floor to form an underwater ‘barrier’ in one of the most intensively fished areas of the MPA. After each boulder is placed, we call the authorities to tell them the coordinates of each placement, and they update maritime maps to inform other vessels.
Effectively, this creates a boulder barrier at the bottom of the sea to ensure that bottom trawlers cannot operate in and around this zone. We’re creating our own ‘Ocean Park’ at sea.
The Arctic Sunrise is also going to be patrolling the area to deter destructive fishers from operating here. In taking these actions, we hope to create an actual sanctuary for the ocean life that lives here – a chance for biodiversity to rebuild and ecosystems to recover after decades of trawling and dredging.
Our oceans are in crisis
Our seas are in a dire state. Ocean temperature records are getting smashed. Overfishing is driving key fish populations to the brink of collapse. Marine scientists warn we’re at growing risk of triggering irreversible ocean tipping points – with some already passed.
The UK has signed up to a global agreement to protect 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030, which scientists say is the minimum required for a chance at recovery. But based on current levels of progress, the world is a staggering 265 years away from this target. Less than 1% of UK waters are protected from destructive fishing.
Destructive industrial fishing harms everyone. It strips catches from small-scale fishers and threatens the livelihoods, wellbeing, and traditions of coastal communities worldwide. It devastates fragile marine ecosystems that have thrived for millennia – vital ecosystems that absorb carbon, regulate global temperatures, and sustain the extraordinary life and beauty of our oceans.
The government will undoubtedly condemn us for taking matters into our own hands. But this is a safe and peaceful last resort protest to a crisis that threatens everything we love. After years of campaigning and lobbying for better ocean protection from the government, we’re stepping up to take the action they refuse to. Greenpeace UK is exercising our legal right to nature protest, and putting our own safeguards in place for species like the harbour porpoise.
As David Attenborough said, ‘if we save the sea, we save our world’. At home, that means banning destructive fishing in our Marine Protected Areas. Globally, that means leading the charge for ocean sanctuaries across the Atlantic.