Illegal fishing along a 480-kilometre stretch of Türkiye's Mediterranean coast has fallen by about 80 percent. More than 30 Mediterranean monk seals now live in those waters.
The sea between Gökova Bay and Cape Gelidonya is managed by local conservationists together with fishing communities. The Endangered Landscapes & Seascapes Programme backed them with a grant of three million dollars in 2019, the Good News Network reports. Protected water has tripled since then. Six marine protected areas now cover roughly 40,000 hectares.
Between 2019 and 2023 the teams created or widened 18 no-fishing zones. The Turkish conservationist Zafer Kızılkaya leads the work. He co-founded the Mediterranean Conservation Society, Akdeniz Koruma Derneği, and won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2023. The programme that funds him grew out of a Cambridge University initiative and draws its money from the British Arcadia Fund.
Gökova Bay set the template. It became Türkiye's first marine protected area in 2010, and almost half of it was closed to bottom trawling, Euronews reported on 28 April 2026. Enforcement rests on the people who live there. Marine rangers, many of them fishers themselves, patrol 100 kilometres of coast every day.
The results are measurable. Nearly 73 percent of all fish species found in Türkiye occur in the bay, according to Euronews. Monk seals have returned to breed, and sandbar sharks have reappeared in the wider seascape. The income of local fishers has risen by 300 percent, the NGO Revive Our Ocean reports.
One of the rangers is Ayşenur Ölmez, 28, who grew up fishing in Gökova Bay and became Türkiye's first female marine ranger. "I call the sea home. I call Gökova home. And to protect my home, I had to do something," she told Revive Our Ocean.
The pressure has not disappeared. Tourism in the region is growing, and boat traffic with it. Across Europe the record is weaker still: bottom trawlers work inside more than half of the continent's 6,000 marine protected areas, Euronews reported, citing lobbying, weak enforcement and the gap between conservation rules and fisheries rules.