22 Aug 2023
Gabon completed mainland Africa’s first-ever “debt-for-nature swap” , refinancing $500 million of its debt and earmarking $163 million in savings for marine conservation, the latest in a burgeoning list of “blue bond” deals. The central African nation, home to the world’s largest population of leatherback turtles, will spend the money over the next 15 years identifying new marine […]
22 Aug 2023
The maritime industry – which accounts for nearly 3% of global CO2 emissions and is under pressure from investors and environmental groups to accelerate decarbonisation – is exploring a number of different technologies including ammonia and methanol in an effort to move away from dirtier bunker fuel. In a step forward in the decarbonisation aims […]
15 Aug 2023
Marine environmentalists have reacted with concern at news the UK will allow commercial fishing of bluefin tuna for the first time in 60 years. The Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) have announced that 10 licences would be issued for a small-scale trial of commercial fishing, with the tuna brought ashore for consumption, […]
15 Aug 2023
The UN treaty on the high seas, signed in June, succeeded the fishing treaty, as an even more useful legal tool for protecting international waters. To date, all of the Arctic’s protected marine regions have been inside the 200-mile exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of individual countries. The largest such protected area, designated in 2019, is […]
15 Aug 2023
Many areas outside national and regional protected area networks contribute to the effective in-situ conservation of biodiversity. Appropriately recognising, reporting and supporting such areas is increasingly important in the context of biodiversity loss and climate change. Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) recognised early in the CBD’s Strategic Plan (2011-2020) that ‘other effective […]
15 Aug 2023
Dogger Bank, a sandbank in the North Sea was designated a marine protected area more than decade ago to conserve its sensitive seabed habitat. Yet for most of that time, industrial fishing vessels legally dragged damaging gear across the seabed, prompting NGOs to cite it as one of Europe’s emblematic “paper parks,” where the designation […]
15 Aug 2023
A paper, published in Conservation Letters, assesses how existing recommendations for climate resilience are applied in real-world MPA management, using criteria from five key management components: objectives, assessments, design, monitoring, and management. The review evaluates 172 management plans for 555 MPAs across 52 countries. The researchers found that MPA management plans contain many underlying scientific […]
15 Aug 2023
A recovery in the number of corals growing on the Great Barrier Reef over recent years has paused, with government scientists blaming bleaching, disease and attacks by starfish. Results from the latest annual surveys of more than 100 individual reefs show a small drop in coral cover over the northern and central parts of the […]
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