Places where nature thrives outside of protected areas have huge potential to help the world achieve the global pledge to conserve 30% of Earth’s lands and waters by 2030 A sacred forest in India. A community-managed fishery in the Philippines. A military training ground in Europe. What do these places have in common?
The world’s leading marine scientists have issued a stark warning that many shark and ray populations risk declining beyond recovery within our lifetimes unless immediate global political action is taken.
Scientists were gathered at the world’s largest shark and ray conservation conference, Shark International 2026. Held from 4-8 May, the event brought together more than 800 participants from over 80 countries in Colombo, Sri Lanka, marking the first time the conference has been hosted in Asia.
Target 3 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework aims to increase global protected and conserved area coverage to at least 30% by 2030. The impact on people, whether positive or negative, will depend on the social context of additional areas and how they are governed and managed. Here, we show that Target 3 could affect large and socially diverse populations under different implementation scenarios. Nearly half the human population lives within 10 km of areas included in a scenario maximising biodiversity representation.
As the global community accelerates efforts towards the 30x30 target — protecting 30% of the ocean by 2030, as agreed under the Convention of Biological Diversity — marine conservation has entered a decisive phase. Governments are expanding ocean protection, multilateral agreements are advancing (e.g., the UN’s Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement) and financial commitments are growing (e.g., $9.1 billion in new financial commitments were secured at the 10th Our Ocean Conference).
Stronger shark conservation policies across China could – in effect – save the species from extinction, is the argument being levelled at the United States via a petition asking the US to better hold China accountable for failing to meet basic conservation standards.
New data, released by the Center for Biological Diversity, has revealed the scale of a crisis that has already eliminated more than two-thirds of the world’s oceanic sharks.
For a realm that covers most of the planet, the ocean attracts a modest share of charitable attention. In philanthropic terms, it remains a niche cause: widely discussed, but thinly financed. That gap has narrowed in recent years, though only slightly and from a low base.
A growing body of peer-reviewed literature is focused on the relationship between Indigenous Peoples' lands (Indigenous lands) and conservation outcomes.
We performed a systematic review of this English reported peer-reviewed literature (n = 111) to examine: the key characteristics; the conservation outcomes documented; the methods used in these studies; and the factors that can shape the effectiveness of Indigenous lands compared to other land tenure types.
The deep sea contains a wealth of potential mineral resources, many of which are being investigated for commercial exploitation. Exploration and technical tests started in the late 1970s with an initial focus on polymetallic nodules from an abyssal region in the eastern Pacific Ocean called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ). More recently, exploration has commenced at seafloor massive sulphides (formed by hydrothermal vents) and seamounts (for cobalt-rich crusts).
The global trade in sea cucumbers has grown since 2013 and continues to decimate the populations of many species, according to a recent study that cites “escalating impacts” and calls for stronger conservation measures. “Nowadays it’s overexploited nearly all over in the world,” Chantal Conand, an emeritus associate at France’s National Museum of Natural History and lead author of the study, told Mongabay, speaking of sea cucumbers generally.
he adoption of the BBNJ Agreement concluded a decades-long dispute over how MGRs of ABNJ should be legally classified and how benefits, particularly monetary benefits, derived from the utilisation and commercialisation of these MGRs, should be shared. The outcome represented a legally creative compromise bridging the opposing positions of the Global North and South on these issues. This article argues that the BBNJ regime should be understood less as a final resolution of distributive conflict and more as a reconfiguration of ocean justice through the deferral of equity claims.
