Portugal creates North Atlantic's largest marine sanctuary

Bravo, Portugal!

More of this, please, everyone.

Never understood why Okinawa doesn't do this. If the prefecture had set aside areas where they could plant sea grass, we might have more dugongs.

I would imagine that not everyone will be happy about this. Unless they were properly compensated.

"The Madeiran fishing fleet consists of 434 vessels, with a combined gross tonnage (GT) of 3.984 thousand and an engine power of 16.483 thousand kW. Of these, 387 vessels have a length lower than 12 meters, 35 are between 12 and 24 meters, while only 12 are between 24 and 40 meters long1 . Almost the half of the vessels are powered, but a slight majority (54%) is composed by unpowered vessels".

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/IDAN/2017/601978/IPOL_IDA(2017)601978_EN.pdf

I would imagine that not everyone will be happy about this. Unless they were properly compensated.

How much of the fleet actually fished in the Selvagens, an archipelago closer to the Canaries than Madeira?

Lets see what they do when one of Chinas massive fishing fleet appears that are in the habit of turning off their transponders before devastating a protect area. I doubt Portugal can patrol these islands 365/365.

Well done.

However, as has been stated, Portugal will need to have a presence in this area, if it wants to prevent fishing pirates from other nations from destroying the preserve. Words without the power to back them up will not be effective.

Portugal has been getting things right on several social and global issues. They must have a large young and progressive population!