Abstract
Marine ecosystems face increasing threats, yet legal protections often fail due to fragmented enforcement and a lack of monitoring tools. While qualitative assessments exist, systematic comparisons of policy effectiveness remain elusive. Here, we present an AI-powered legal observatory quantifying marine environmental law enforcement across 15 French-speaking African coastal states. Analyzing seven key prohibitions, including plastic bags, bottom trawling, and oil discharges, reveals stark disparities. Although 92% of states ban plastic bags, only 38% impose penalties. Coastal sand extraction is restricted in just 40% of these countries, with significant gaps in operational sanctions and monitoring. By integrating empirical legal indicators with machine learning, we demonstrate how AI automates cross-country comparisons, identifies enforcement weaknesses, and tracks policy evolution over time. This approach provides a replicable framework for dynamic, data-driven marine governance, essential for tackling transboundary challenges like climate change and biodiversity erosion.
Acknowledgements
This work has been supported by the AIME project, the ISblue project, the Interdisciplinary Graduate School for the Blue Planet (ANR-17-EURE-0015), and cofunded by a grant from the French government under the program “Investissements d’Avenir” embedded in France 2030. This work also received government funding managed by the French National Research Agency under France 2030 (ANR-22-EXBR-0006) as part of the BRIDGES research program, Fishing and biodiversity in the Indian Ocean.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary information
Supplementary Information (download PDF )
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Reprints and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Bonnin, M., Al Mouatamid, Y., Perdereau, M. et al. Leveraging AI to objectively analyze legal frameworks protecting the marine environment: a focus on enforced bans.
npj Ocean Sustain (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44183-026-00221-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44183-026-00221-1
Source: Ecology - nature.com
