SÃO MATEUS, Portugal — Winter forced Emanuel Alves to remove his boat from the water at the port of São Mateus in the Azores, the Portuguese archipelago in the North…
U.S. President Donald Trump issued a proclamation on Feb. 6 to open a marine protected area off the northeastern U.S. to commercial fishing, in his latest move to deregulate the…
This is the first of two stories about the potential impact of Cambodia’s planned Funan Techo Canal. Part two, about consequences for inland communities and wildlife, can be read here.…
SANTA CRUZ, GALÁPAGOS ISLANDS, Ecuador — “Good morning,” Walter Borbor, a social media-famous fisher, says to his followers in a 2022 Instagram video. “What we have here is a plantado.”…
Sharks and rays in the Western Indian Ocean are facing an extinction crisis. Almost half of the region’s 270 known species (46%) are currently threatened with extinction. A recently released…
For most of modern history, the open ocean has been treated as a place apart. Beyond the 200-nautical-mile limits of national jurisdiction, it was governed by custom, fragmented rules, and…
At the end of 2024, the Azores stood as a beacon of hope and a global leader in ocean conservation, having created the largest network of marine protected areas (MPAs)…
2025 was a key year for ocean policymaking, marking the midway point in the U.N. Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. The past 12 months brought landslide multilateral wins…
Climate change is pushing coral reefs to the brink. A new scientific report warns that the world has already crossed its first climate tipping point, and reefs could face long-term…
A recent study provides the first detailed map of Cambodia’s coastal seafloor habitats and finds that simple, low-cost anti-trawling structures are helping seagrass meadows recover and support small-scale fishers in…
The way the oceans are managed is meant to be like a successful medieval commons. Most medieval commons weren’t open-access, but commoners had distinct rights in law and committees organized…
Populations of northern bottlenose whales (Hyperoodon ampullatus), playful animals that resemble large dolphins, stretch across the Atlantic Ocean, with each group of whales living year-round in a particular deep ocean…
Located off the south coast of Bahia state and the north coast of Espírito Santo state in Brazil, the Abrolhos Seascape is known for its rich concentration of marine biodiversity,…
This November, as Brazil opened the curtains to host the U.N. Climate Conference, COP30, in the Amazonian city of Belém, the troubles orbiting the country's environmental agenda were featured in…
KARACHI — On Sept. 2, the government of Balochistan province in Pakistan declared the country’s third marine protected area, around Miani Hor Lagoon on the country’s central coast. The biodiversity-rich…
The annual meeting of the international body responsible for conservation of the marine ecosystems in the Southern Ocean concluded on Friday with no progress on two contentious issues before it:…
Belize sells itself as a small-country answer to a big problem: how to keep the sea alive and the people who depend on it working. The pitch is strong. A…
Norway proposed almost doubling the catch limit for krill in the Southern Ocean during the annual conference of the intergovernmental body that manages Antarctic fisheries taking place Oct. 20-31, according…
JAKARTA — In a new report, marine activists are demanding restoration efforts from nickel miners and the Indonesian government for affected areas of Raja Ampat while also urging authorities to…
JAKARTA — Even as UNESCO hails Raja Ampat as a global conservation model, nickel mining threatens to carve up its forests and coral reefs. On Sept. 27, UNESCO designated 26…
A new study reports that the Bird’s Head Seascape off Indonesia’s West Papua serves as a vital habitat for juvenile male whale sharks, but lift-net fisheries, tourism boats and emerging…
A major treaty establishing a framework for the world’s nations to jointly manage marine conservation in international waters, which cover about half of the Earth’s surface, has reached enough ratifications…
The island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe has taken a significant step in marine conservation, announcing that it will establish eight marine protected areas in its coastal waters. The…
BENGKULU, Indonesia — Yesi held her daughter Helda tightly, but the little one still shivered for days in the tropical heat over Teluk Sepang, a bay on Sumatra’s west coast.…
In June 2023, after nearly two decades of negotiations, the international community adopted the “Agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the Conservation and…
San Matías Gulf, on the northern coast of Argentina’s Patagonia region, is one of the most biodiverse areas in the Argentine Sea. The Valdés Peninsula — a UNESCO World Heritage…
Lake Chad is nearly 1,130 kilometers (700 miles) from the ocean, but Nwamaka Okeke-Ogbuafor fears it is a preview of what’s ahead for African and other tropical fisheries. Straddling four…
The phrase malezi mema in Comorian loosely translates to “parenting well.” A fishers’ group of the same name on the island of Anjouan in Comoros is trying to provide a…
For nearly two decades, Alejandro González has stood on the front lines of marine conservation in Mexico, from the coral-fringed reefs of Cabo Pulmo to the remote volcanic outposts of…
The eastern Baltic cod has shrunk dramatically in size in recent decades due to rapid evolution — changes at the genetic level — caused by decades of intensive fishing, a…
A global study tracking nearly 13,000 individual marine animals has uncovered a sharp disconnect between where these animals actually spend their time and where marine protections exist. The findings raise…
These are turbulent times for the global economy and multilateralism. Uncertainty lies at every turn, yet for Antigua and Barbuda — and other Small Island Developing States (SIDS) like ours…
