IF UNDISTURBED natural beauty is your bag, it's time you headed to New Caledonia. The group of islands in the Pacific is a French territory that now boasts the title of the world's largest protected area.
The newly created Natural Park of the Coral Sea is a region of islands and reefs covering 95 per cent of the territory, which is 3000 kilometres west of Australia. At 1.3 million square kilometres, it is three times the size of Germany.
The park is home to 48 species of shark and 25 species of marine mammal. It includes the world's largest lagoon and a coral reef second in size only to the Great Barrier Reef.
The islands support 250,000 people, who rely on hauls of up to 3000 tonnes of fish a year. Management of the park will include a programme to harvest the fish sustainably and with minimal harm to other biodiversity.
Its creation is the start of an even bolder plan – the Pacific Oceanscape – to extend the area of Pacific Ocean protected to an expanse covering 8 per cent of the world's surface, or four times the area of the US.
"This is a great step towards protecting New Caledonia," says Fiona Llewellyn of the Zoological Society of London, but it needs effective management. Without it, "such a large-scale designation will simply serve to over-inflate the figure of how much ocean is protected, without any benefits".
This article appeared in print under the headline "Protecting a Pacific paradise"
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