The Blue Carbon Finance Toolbox provides a comprehensive overview of financial mechanisms and strategies to support the conservation, restoration, and sustainable management of blue carbon ecosystems.
Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) can increase the resilience of reef communities to disturbances, playing a role in sheltering biodiversity from climate-related impacts. To determine if the protection status allows for better resilience after coral bleaching events, we recorded soundscapes of eight reefs of Moorea Island (French Polynesia). We compared the biophony of MPAs to the one of adjacent non-protected zones recorded in 2015, before two bleaching events (2016 and 2019), to the one in 2021. Then, the biophony from 2021 was compared within and outside MPAs.
There is a widespread perception that illegal fishing is common in marine protected areas (MPAs) due to strong incentives for poaching and the high cost of monitoring and enforcement. Using artificial intelligence and satellite-based Earth observations, we provide estimates of industrial fishing activity in fully and highly protected MPAs worldwide, in which such fishing is banned. We find little to no activity in most cases.
Despite the increasing number of species assessed for extinction risk by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) (163,040 species as of 2024), only about 1 in 1,000 have been downlisted due to genuine population improvement. Although this rare conservation achievement has been widely celebrated in several recent cases, some other downlisting decisions have met with controversy. A primary role of the IUCN is to assess extinction risk.
The conservation, restoration, and sustainable management of blue carbon ecosystems are critical to addressing the intertwined crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. Actionable blue carbon ecosystems (BCEs) are considered mangrove forests, seagrass meadows, and tidal salt marshes, all of which have exceptionally high carbon sequestration potential per unit area and offer a range of benefits for communities, biodiversity, and climate adaptation and resilience.
Neotrygon romeoi n. sp. (Dasyatidae), a new species of blue-spotted maskray from Fiji, previously confused with Neotrygon kuhlii (Müller and Henle 1841) or Neotrygon trigonoides (Castelnau 1873), is described based on nine specimens (310–397 mm disc width) from Fiji. Neotrygon romeoi n. sp. is a large maskray with a broadly angled snout, long claspers in adult males and a median row of thornlets extending from the nape to the tail base.
Papua New Guinea (PNG) is home to one of the largest mangrove habitats (6% of the world’s mangrove area), which plays a crucial role in coastal protection, carbon sequestration and supporting biodiversity and livelihoods. With such an extensive mangrove cover, monitoring at scale is invaluable for sustainable mangrove management (conservation, protection and restoration).
Mangroves provide numerous ecosystem services and are increasingly recognized as a natural climate solution. As a result, multiple recent initiatives have set ambitious mangrove restoration targets. However, there has been little research estimating the costs of achieving such targets, either site by site or in aggregate. Here, we spatially model the costs of restoring mangroves globally based on reported implementation costs from 249 restoration projects in 25 countries.
This guidance aims to inform the planning, design, and implementation of new and expanded MPAs, OECMs, areas conserved by Indigenous peoples, and networks of protected and conserved areas at the community, national, and international levels. It focuses on why it is important to consider climate change in MPA1 planning, and how new areas can be established in ways that build climate resilience, adaptation, and mitigation.
Comprehensive, global, and standardized data on ocean regulations are essential to assess protection levels. They are also key to successfully measuring progress towards 30 × 30 goals. ProtectedSeas’ Navigator is a repository of regulatory and spatial data for over 21,700 unique marine managed areas globally, with summaries of restricted fishing and marine activities extracted from official regulations.
