Marine Protected Areas of Panama: 54% of the EEZ and the Banco Volcán Expansion

The headline: more than half the EEZ

The single most important fact about Panamanian marine protection is a percentage. After the expansion of the Banco Volcán Marine Protected Area, Panama conserves 54.26% of its exclusive economic zone (EEZ), which made it the first country in Latin America to exceed the 50% ocean-protection mark^[1]. That figure is the one to cite when the question is “how much of Panama’s ocean is protected”, not a rounder, looser “nearly 60%” (which appears in some framings of the same event) but the specific 54.26% of the EEZ.

A note on what that number does and does not mean. The EEZ is the sea zone over which Panama has jurisdiction, and “conserves” includes areas with varying levels of protection; not every hectare inside the MPA network is a strict no-take zone. In the Banco Volcán expansion specifically, at least half of the total zone was designated as fully protected, with the remainder under lesser restrictions^[1]. So “54% of the EEZ conserved” and “fully protected everywhere” are not the same claim; the headline is real, but the protection is layered.

Banco Volcán: from 2015 decree to 2023 expansion

The Banco Volcán MPA was not created in 2023. It was first established by executive decree in 2015^[1]. What happened in early 2023 was a major expansion. On 2 March 2023, President Laurentino Cortizo and Minister of Environment Milciades Concepción signed the expansion decree, which took the area from roughly 14,200 km² to over 90,000 km²^[1]. That is better than a sixfold increase in a single decision, and it is the act that pushed Panama over the 50% line.

Two institutional points are worth holding onto. First, the expansion was a top-level political decision signed by the president and the environment minister, not a quiet bureaucratic adjustment, which tells you something about how politically salient ocean protection had become in Panama by 2023. Second, Mission Blue’s reporting of the event carried direct statements from Minister Concepción, which is why the 54.26% figure and the species list can be attributed to a primary-level account of the decision rather than to a third-party summary^[1].

What the expansion was built to protect

The biological case for the Banco Volcán expansion rested on a specific set of species. The expanded area is documented as hosting around 120 pelagic fish species, including three critically endangered sharks (the scalloped hammerhead, the great hammerhead, and the oceanic whitetip) alongside five endangered species such as the whale shark, the mako shark, two deep-sea sharks, and the giant oceanic manta ray^[1].

That species list is the real payload of the 2023 decision. Large pelagics and wide-ranging sharks are exactly the animals that smaller, nearshore MPAs cannot protect, because their home ranges dwarf any single park. A scalloped hammerhead or an oceanic whitetip moves across ocean basins; protecting it requires protected space at the basin scale, which is what an over-90,000 km² zone begins to provide. The shark species named here (scalloped hammerhead, oceanic whitetip) are treated in more detail on the shark-conservation page, including their IUCN and CITES status.

Coiba: what “protected” looks like in practice

Banco Volcán is the expansion story; Coiba is the reality-check story. Coiba National Park and its Special Zone of Marine Protection (ZEPM) is Panama’s most internationally recognised marine site, a UNESCO World Heritage property, and the IUCN’s World Heritage Outlook gives it a frank assessment.

As of the IUCN assessment finalised on 11 October 2025, Coiba’s conservation outlook is rated “Significant Concern,” with both the site’s values and the overall threat level rated as high concern/high threat^[2]. The principal threats the IUCN identifies are unregulated fishing, bycatch of threatened species, tourism development pressure, and climate change acting particularly on the coral reefs^[2].

Reading the Banco Volcán and Coiba records together is the most honest way to understand Panama’s marine protection. The country has built an impressively large MPA network on paper, large enough to make it a regional leader by area protected, but the IUCN’s “Significant Concern” rating on its flagship site shows that designation does not automatically translate into effective enforcement. The threats at Coiba (fishing, bycatch, tourism, climate) are precisely the threats that a well-resourced, well-enforced MPA is supposed to suppress. The gap between the 54.26% headline and the Significant Concern rating is the central tension in Panamanian marine conservation.

There are positive signals in the same IUCN record: removal of feral livestock from Coiba Island, increased park-ranger presence, and progress on a Public Use Plan for tourism^[2]. Those are the kinds of operational improvements that move a site from “protected on the map” toward “protected in practice,” and they are worth noting alongside the high-threat rating rather than treating the assessment as purely negative.

The wider network

Banco Volcán and Coiba are the two anchor nodes, but they sit inside a broader marine geography. Coiba’s Special Zone of Marine Protection is part of the Eastern Tropical Pacific Marine Corridor (CMAR), connecting to Costa Rica’s Isla del Coco, Colombia’s Malpelo and Gorgona, and Ecuador’s Galápagos, a transnational network designed around the movements of the very pelagics the Banco Volcán expansion protects. The coiba-marine-special-zone page covers that corridor logic in detail, and the coiba-island geography page covers the island itself.

On the Caribbean side and along both coasts, several of the Ramsar wetlands (see wetlands-and-ramsar) add estuarine and mangrove protection that complements the open-water MPAs. Panama’s marine protection is therefore best understood as a portfolio (large offshore zones for pelagics, island and reef zones around Coiba, and coastal wetland zones for shorebirds, mangroves, and nursery habitat) rather than as a single contiguous reserve.

How to read Panama’s MPAs

If you are a visitor, the practical entry points are the sites with infrastructure: Coiba, reached from Santa Catalina, and the marine environments around Bocas del Toro. The headline 54% figure is genuinely impressive, but it mostly describes large offshore zones that a typical traveller will never enter; the visitor experience is concentrated at the named, accessible sites, where the gap between designation and enforcement (the IUCN’s “Significant Concern”) is most visible.

If you are researching or writing about Panamanian marine conservation, the two numbers to keep in tension are 54.26% (the share of the EEZ conserved after the Banco Volcán expansion) and the IUCN’s Significant Concern outlook on Coiba. Together they tell the whole story: Panama has committed to protecting an unusually large share of its ocean, and it is still working out how to deliver that protection effectively at its most important single site. Either number alone is misleading; the two together are accurate.

The 2015 origin, and what made the 2023 expansion possible

The Banco Volcán story did not begin in 2023, and understanding the 2015 origin clarifies what the later expansion actually was. The Banco Volcán area, the Área de Recursos Manejados Banco Volcán, was first created in 2015, on the Caribbean side of the isthmus, in its smaller 14,212 km² form^[3][1]. That 2015 creation matters because it established the legal and institutional precedent: once Banco Volcán existed as a protected area, expanding it in 2023 was an amendment to an existing instrument rather than the creation of a new one from scratch. The sixfold expansion was therefore politically and legally easier than founding a fresh MPA would have been, because the hard institutional work (defining the area, establishing the principle of protection, building the management precedent) had already been done eight years earlier.

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s own account fills in the institutional spine behind that sequence, and it is worth stating because it corrects a common impression that these parks simply “appeared.” STRI led the scientific design and justification for the creation of Panama’s first two oceanic marine protected areas in 2015, Banco Volcán in the Caribbean and the Cordillera de Coiba in the Pacific, a step that took the country to roughly 13% marine protection and past the international Aichi biodiversity target^[3]. A few years later, in 2021, STRI again supplied the scientific case for expanding the Cordillera de Coiba’s boundaries, which brought Panama’s total marine protected area to 98,228 km² and met the UN 30×30 target nine years early^[3]. The 2023 Banco Volcán expansion brought the protected area to roughly 93,390 km² and pushed the country past 54% of its ocean, the third act of a nearly two-decade STRI-supported effort that began with Parque Nacional Coiba in 2004 and the Las Perlas archipelago in 2007^[3].

A note on the area figures, because the two primary sources frame the 2023 expansion differently and the difference is easy to misread. Mission Blue describes the expansion as taking Banco Volcán “from roughly 14,200 km² to over 90,000 km²”, framing it as an addition of roughly 76,000–80,000 km² onto the 2015 baseline^[1]. STRI gives a 93,390 km² figure for the protection the 2023 decree granted Banco Volcán, which reads as the new total area rather than an increment^[3]. The two are consistent at the order-of-magnitude level, both putting the resulting Banco Volcán at roughly 90,000 km², but they are not the same calculation: reading STRI’s 93,390 as an addition on top of the 14,212 baseline would imply a ~107,000 km² total that neither source states. This page therefore cites the ~93,390 km² / “over 90,000 km²” resulting area, and treats the 93,390 as STRI’s figure for the granted protection rather than as an increment onto the 2015 footprint.

That trajectory is worth noting because it is a recurring pattern in marine conservation: the headline moment (the 2023 expansion, the 54.26% figure) is usually the visible peak of a longer process that built the foundation. Panama’s over-50% ocean protection was not a single dramatic decision; it was the maturation of a 2015 decree, itself built on earlier marine-policy and science work, into a much larger commitment when the political conditions allowed. For anyone studying how large marine protection actually gets done, the Banco Volcán sequence (establish small, then expand, with a research institution supplying the scientific case at each step) is a more useful model than the headline figure suggests.

Fully protected versus multiple use

The phrase “protected area” conceals a spectrum, and the Banco Volcán framework is explicitly layered rather than uniform. Of the expanded zone, at least half was designated as fully protected (the strictest category, in which extraction is prohibited) while the remainder operates under lesser restrictions that allow some regulated use^[1]. That split is not a compromise that weakens the MPA; it is a deliberate design choice that reflects how large marine protection actually has to work. A fully protected no-take zone over an entire 90,000 km² would be ecologically ideal in principle but politically and practically impossible to enforce across that much open ocean; a layered design (strict protection in the most critical areas, regulated use elsewhere) produces a protected area that can actually be implemented and enforced rather than one that exists only on paper.

The distinction matters for how the 54.26% figure should be read. The percentage reflects the share of the EEZ under some form of conservation management, not the share under strict no-take protection. Both numbers are legitimate and both matter, but they answer different questions: the larger figure describes the breadth of Panama’s marine-conservation commitment, while the fully-protected subset describes the intensity of protection in the most critical zones. Reading the headline as “54% of Panama’s ocean is fully protected” would overstate it; reading it as “54% is under conservation management, with the most critical areas fully protected” is accurate. That precision is what separates an honest account of the achievement from a inflated one.

Quick reference

Last reviewed: 2026-07-03