Greenpeace's call for 40 per cent of our oceans to be set aside as reserves may sound radical, or even far-fetched. But it isn't. Others, such as the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution have echoed what we're asking for. And sometimes, size DOES matter.
Large-scale Marine Reserves build in resilience to the ecosystems they encompass, allowing them to adapt to changes we might not even be able to predict (as well as those we are anticipating, like climate change). Most of what politicians have proposed quite simply doesn't go far enough: they are either too small, or too weak (the proposals, not the politicians).