Papua New Guinea has just become one of the planet's biggest ocean stewards. The government formally announced two new large-scale marine protected areas in the Bismarck and Solomon Seas this week, locking in safeguards across more than 77,000 square miles of tropical ocean — an area roughly the size of the United Kingdom.
The newly protected waters sit in the heart of the Coral Triangle, the most biodiverse marine region on Earth. It is the only place where more than 600 species of reef-building coral, six of the world's seven sea turtle species, and dozens of shark and ray species overlap in a single ecosystem. The new reserves shelter spawning grounds for tuna, leatherback turtle nesting beaches, and reef systems that local coastal communities have fished sustainably for thousands of years.
How big is "the size of the UK"?
To put 77,000 square miles in perspective: it is larger than the entire United Kingdom and bigger than the U.S. state of Washington. With this announcement, Papua New Guinea instantly vaults into the top tier of countries by absolute area of protected ocean, joining the likes of Australia, France, and the United States.
Crucially, large parts of the new reserves are no-take zones — meaning industrial fishing, deep-sea mining, and oil and gas extraction will be off-limits. Scientists have long argued that fully protected marine areas are the single most effective tool for letting reefs and fish stocks recover, and PNG's government framed the move as both a conservation milestone and an economic investment in the long-term productivity of coastal fisheries.
Designed with local communities, not over them
What sets the announcement apart is the way it was built. The boundaries and rules were negotiated over several years with traditional resource owners along the coastline. Customary tenure — the centuries-old system in which Papua New Guinea's clans own reefs and reef passages — was treated as the starting point, not an obstacle. Community-managed zones are layered inside the larger protected area, giving villages tools to enforce limits on outside vessels while still feeding their families.
Conservation groups including The Nature Conservancy and the Wildlife Conservation Society have spent more than a decade supporting the science, surveys, and consultations that made the designations possible. PNG officials have said additional protected areas are already in the pipeline, with the country eyeing the global "30 by 30" target of safeguarding 30% of land and sea by 2030.
Why this matters beyond PNG
The Coral Triangle supports the livelihoods of more than 120 million people across six countries. Healthy reefs there feed regional fisheries, buffer coastlines against storms, and store enormous amounts of carbon in surrounding mangroves and seagrass meadows. By protecting such a large slice of it, Papua New Guinea helps anchor an entire regional system that countries from Indonesia to the Solomon Islands depend on.
It is also a quiet rebuke to the idea that meaningful ocean protection only happens in wealthy nations. PNG is a small island developing state with limited fiscal capacity — and yet it just put more ocean off-limits to extraction in a single announcement than many G20 countries have managed in a decade.
For divers, fishers, scientists, and the millions of fish that travel through these waters, June 2026 marks a very good day.
