Riding his bike to work in the Netherlands’ Zeeland province, Tjeerd Bouma passed fields of pear and apple trees. His mind wandered. As a coastal ecologist at the Royal Netherlands…
PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea — A moratorium on deep-sea mining established by a group of Pacific island nations has struck a blow to the Solwara 1 project in Papua…
KAVIENG, Papua New Guinea — Papua New Guinea’s minister for mining confirmed in early August that a deep-sea mining company would once again be looking to mine the seafloor under…
KURUWITU, Kenya — Six days a week, Katana Ngala reports to his workplace, a rudimentary open-air workshop by the beach. Neat and well-shaded under huge palm trees, his workshop is…
KWALE and KILIFI COUNTIES, Kenya — One June afternoon at the Mwanamia fish landing site on Kenya’s north coast, Garama Karisa was busy mending his gear for an afternoon fishing…
Guanabara Bay, the historic gateway to Rio de Janeiro, is both a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most polluted coastal ecosystems in the world. It sees 18,000…
ORACABESSA BAY, Jamaica — An encounter with a long-spined sea urchin is fairly rare in the Caribbean these days, but not for Jaye James who is currently feeding chunks of…
KINGSTON, Jamaica — In November, President Emmanuel Macron announced that France was calling for an international ban on deep-sea mining, a proposed activity that has received much attention due to…
JAKARTA — Uncontrolled burning of plastic waste on Indonesian beaches has given rise to plastic-rock hybrids that deposit in and may pollute coastal ecosystems and fisheries, a new study has…
Once a nursery for marine life, Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro is now dying from the dumping of thousands of liters of sewage into its waters; artisanal fishermen now survive by picking up the garbage that floats in the bay.
KINGSTON, Jamaica — Negotiations broke down at deep-sea mining meetings that recently took place in Jamaica, exposing deep rifts within the International Seabed Authority, the U.N.-associated body tasked with governing…
KINGSTON, Jamaica — On July 21, nations reached an agreement that will make it more difficult for deep-sea mining to start immediately in international waters, while not fully halting the…
WEST SERAM, Indonesia — It’s a sunny day off the coast of Piru village on the island district of West Seram, in Indonesia’s Maluku province. La Samiun and his wife…
The marine biodiversity hotspot known as the Coral Triangle is home to more than 76% of the world's known coral species and more than 3,000 species of fish. It sustains…
A new program in Hawai‘i will draw on the collaborative efforts of science and community to restore local corals and coastlines to make reef communities more resilient in the future.…
How do you make people care about protecting marine habitats and wildlife? You tell stories, says Enric Sala, an explorer-in-residence and founder of the Pristine Seas project at the National…
A population of bowhead whales living in the western Arctic has long followed the same migration patterns. But new research suggests that climate change and the subsequent melting of sea…
JAKARTA — The ongoing development of Indonesia’s new capital city, Nusantara, in eastern Borneo has raised alarm bells among environmentalists and human rights defenders around the world as the region…
In the warm waters of the Caribbean, long-spined sea urchins — inky black creatures resembling pincushions stuck with knitting needles — gobble up algae with their claw-like mouths. But when…
Norway is moving forward with plans to mine its continental shelf to procure minerals critical for renewable energy technologies. However, some scientists, members of civil society and even industry leaders…
Farah Obaidullah’s life has pivoted around the ocean. Growing up in Gabon and the Netherlands, she spent as much time as possible in or near the water, snorkeling, rescuing marine…
BALIKPAPAN/JAKARTA — A clearing for the ramp to a new toll road in the Indonesian Bornean city of Balikpapan gapes open on the side of a paved highway as big…
When flesh-footed shearwater chicks hatch from their eggs, their parents start working to fill the chicks’ stomachs with as much food as possible. They do this for about 80 to…
SEPAKU/BALIKPAPAN/JAKARTA, Indonesia — In 1977, when Darna was about 8 years old, her family moved from Indonesia’s central island of Java to Borneo, its largest. They were among the tens…
Environmental advocates have long called for a ban on bottom trawling on seamounts in the South Pacific’s international waters, and they hoped one would finally be instituted at a regional…
Machine learning can help conservationists monitor climate impacts across large swaths of marine ecosystems over extended periods of time, a task never possible before. The Delta Maps machine learning tool…
Ocean fisheries experts Daniel Pauly and Rashid Sumaila have been awarded the 2023 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, referred to as a “Nobel Prize for the environment,” in recognition of…
In 2009, a group of Indonesian researchers published a report on the vulnerability to climate change of the eastern Indonesian island of Lombok, home to about 4 million people. Their…
COLOMBO — The Singapore-flagged X-Press Pearl was a brand-new container ship, only three months after being commissioned, when a fire erupted and began sinking off Sri Lanka’s western coast on May 20,…
Scientists remember the years between 2014 and 2017 as a particularly bad time for coral reefs. Elevated temperatures fueled by an El Niño climate pattern harmed about three-quarters of the…
