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On paper, the sea is increasingly protected. Governments have designated vast marine protected areas (MPAs) and pledged to conserve 30% of the ocean by 2030. Maps shaded in reassuring blues now circulate widely. Yet the reality offshore often looks much the same as before. Industrial vessels still trawl through restricted waters, longliners set gear near vulnerable habitats, and sanctions for violations are sporadic. The problem is not a shortage of rules. It is the unevenness of enforcement.

Drawing on the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework's Target 3 and the Ramsar Convention, this briefing note examines the synergies between Ramsar Site designations and OECM recognition, and what these mean for freshwater and coastal ecosystems.

With the entry into force of the BBNJ Agreement, attention has rapidly shifted from negotiation to the practical realities of implementation. This policy brief focuses on what is needed now to operationalize Part IV on Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) in the immediate term, as Parties prepare for the first Conference of the Parties (COP1).

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Coral reefs are marine biodiversity hotspots that provide a wide range of ecosystem services1. They are reservoirs of bioactive metabolites, many produced by microorganisms associated with reef invertebrate hosts2.

Noncompliance regularly undermines the effectiveness of marine protected areas (MPAs) worldwide. The reasons for and drivers of noncompliance depend on the context (e.g., insufficient funding, capacity, neocolonialism, historical conflict), but the prevalent solution offered to curtail noncompliance tends to be more or better enforcement. We posit that this response is well intentioned but incomplete.

Since its initial articulation in the early 1970s, the sphere of legislative and judicial practices regarding the right to a healthy environment (R2HE) has evolved substantially. This report identifies and examines trends and developments in the interpretation of the R2HE over a decade (2015-2025) through an analysis of the advancement of the right in thirty jurisdictions, including international and regional human rights bodies. Call Number: [EL]ISBN/ISSN: 9789280742312Physical Description: 83 p.

In public finance, some costs are politely kept off the books. The ocean has long been one of them. Governments often speak of “blue growth” and “sustainable use,” yet many policies still treat marine ecosystems as a kind of free input: available, resilient, and cheap to replace. The result is ecological decline. It is also a fiscal problem. States end up assuming risks they would not tolerate on land.

Seagrass meadows might not catch the eye like coral reefs, but they play an important and often unsung role in coastal protection, particularly as climate change increasingly eats away at shorelines. Protecting and restoring seagrass meadows, experts say, is a key “nature-based solution” that can also soak up and store carbon.

Freshwater ecosystems regulate the water cycle, support biodiversity and enhance resilience, yet they remain largely overlooked in global climate policies, and most national commitments lack clear, spatially defined targets for their protection and restoration. Here our global map—derived from 30-m land-cover classification, hydrological networks and floodplain models—reveals around 51 million km2 of rivers, wetlands, headwaters, riparian buffers and floodplains that are critical for water security and disaster risk reduction.

A review of the geology, palaeontology, genetic, and morphology studies indicates that during the mid-Miocene to Pliocene, New Guinea consisted of four island Blocks (Vogelkop, Maokop, Central, and Southeastern). The initial dispersal of marsupials from Australia was into the Vogelkop Block. The ancestors of at least six genera (Dactylonax, Microperorytes, Myoictis Pseudochirops, Spilocuscus, Tous) and three species (Dendrolagus inustus, Dendrolagus ursinus, Dorcopsis muelleri) of endemic New Guinean marsupials are likely to have reached New Guinea via this route.