The Coastal Specialist Group (CEM) and six MPAs situated in New Jersey USA, Mexico, Brazil, Portugal and Gabon have developed a group of work on the resilience of MPAs, in the framework of the Transatlantic partnership for MPAs funded by the EU. Each of these sites is exposed to heavy pressures generated by high level urban spread, touristic activities, sediments extraction, industrial disasters and climate change. The managers of these sites have experimented effective solutions to cope with the rising threats through collaborations developed with various stakeholders of their territory and the private sector. Capitalizing on the good practices experienced by these sites, our group of work has developed MPAs resilience criteria and indicators to be used as an additional plug-in together with classical tools used for the evaluation of MPAs management effectiveness.