Ten percent designated, 3.5 percent protected: the ocean’s place in the COP17 review

• October 20, 2026

COP17 opened in Yerevan on 19 October 2026 and runs to 30 October. Delegations from close to 200 countries are there for something the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework has not had before: a full review of collective progress against its 23 targets, four years after they were agreed.

The sea comes out thin

The draft went out for comment in June and arrives in Yerevan as the final report. Its message isn’t subtle. The world is not on track for the 2030 targets, the 2030 Mission or the 2050 vision. Across more than 3,700 national targets, 129 national reports and over 180 commitments from non-state actors, the assessment found marine, coastal and freshwater ecosystems under-represented next to terrestrial ones, and biodiversity data fragmented, with gaps spread across most of the 23 targets.

The Ocean & Climate Platform makes the structural point. No target in the framework is devoted solely to marine biodiversity, so the sea has to be read across targets written mostly with land in mind. Preliminary analyses for the review found national marine efforts under-represented in all of them.

What ten percent actually buys

The 30×30 Global Assessment published in September has the figures. About 10% of the global ocean is currently designated for conservation. Existing national commitments would take that to roughly 12% by 2030, well short of 30%. Only 3.5% is assessed as effectively protected. On land the picture is better: about 20% designated now, about 27% by 2030 if commitments are delivered.

The distance between those two ocean numbers is the part worth sitting with. Mangroves show it starkly, with 33% reported as protected and 0.3% effectively protected. Lance Morgan, quoted in the assessment, said it in five words: “designation alone is not enough.” Ocean finance runs the same way, with about USD 16 billion a year needed against an estimated USD 1.8 billion spent.

Europe has its own delivery problem

Europe isn’t exempt. Member states had until 1 September 2026 to send draft national restoration plans to the Commission under the Nature Restoration Regulation, which requires restoration measures on at least 20% of EU land and sea areas by 2030. MEPs said in October that only nine of 27 had submitted, though the Commission did not confirm a number, and Commissioner Jessika Roswall noted that roughly 15% of the 6.5 billion euro in EU funding for nature, biodiversity and Natura 2000 has been spent.

Teresa Ribera set the EU’s own bar for the fortnight: “Yerevan should be the COP of proof, not only of promises.”

Proof is made at pilot sites

That is the layer PHAROS works in. The project runs restoration demonstrations in Gran Canaria, Ireland and Iceland, tests integrated multi-trophic aquaculture, uses eDNA monitoring to find invasive species before they establish, and runs living labs in Gran Canaria, Ireland, Lanzarote, the Danube Delta and Santorini where fishers and citizens collect data alongside researchers.

None of that registers as a percentage of sea area designated. It’s the evidence that tells a manager whether a designated area is recovering, which species turned up last season, and whether a method is worth scaling. If this review moves countries from designation towards measured recovery, demand for that evidence is about to rise.