World leaders are waking up to the ocean’s role in a healthy planet

Fourteen nations have made an unprecedented and welcome commitment to use marine ecosystems sustainably. It is equally important to establish a system to hold them to account.

A collaboration between researchers from Cornell and the University of Wisconsin-Madison has found that small, community-based reserves in Thailand’s Salween River Basin are serving as critical refuges for fish diversity in a region whose subsistence fisheries have suffered from decades of overharvesting.

The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2016 (SOFIA)

It's Time to Stop Funding Overfishing -- As governments look to spark a green recovery, in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, they should take care to not do more damage than good. Rather than subsidizing fishing activities that hurt the ocean, communities, and the economy, governments have an opportunity to reroute funding toward efforts that bring benefits to marine health and human well-being... The Economist estimates upwards of $4 billion in subsidies each year may support illegal fishing activity... Meanwhile, the World Bank estimates that effective management of global marine fisheries and the recovery of fish stocks would yield increased revenues of $83 billion a year.

The global conservation community has taken a big step toward embracing behavioral approaches to conservation challenges! Last week, IUCN members overwhelmingly adopted Rare's (rare.org/) co-sponsored motion before the #IUCNCongress to “address conservation as a behavioral challenge." The motion paves the way for practitioners to incorporate behavior-centered design (BCD) into their programs.

Members of the International Coral Reef Initiative have agreed on the steps we must take, including to develop and use better tools, or indicators, to measure progress. Now governments have to act.

Protect small-scale fisheries: an income perspective

Coastal agriculture research, I like this interdisciplinary views!

The EC Council just adopted new conclusions for the EU biodiversity strategy, which includes "creating a coherent network of well-managed protected areas... to protect at least 30% of the EU’s sea area"!