Mar Benavides, Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD)
In the ocean, phytoplankton helped by diazotrophs play an outstanding role in withdrawing CO₂ from the atmosphere. But climate change is disturbing this delicate balance.
Global leaders pledged to protect 10% of the oceans by 2020. We’re nowhere close and the goal has proven particularly challenging to achieve in international waters.
The Pacific Ocean produces oxygen, helps regulates the weather, provides food and livelihoods. It’s a place of fun, solace and spiritual connection. But its delicate ecology is under threat.
A boat navigates at night next to large icebergs in eastern Greenland.
(AP Photo/Felipe Dana)
Healthy seagrasses form underwater meadows teeming with fish and shellfish. A successful large-scale restoration project in Virginia could become a model for reseeding damaged seagrass beds worldwide.
Global long-term data simply doesn’t exist for jellyfish, so scientists struggle to predict, track and mitigate their potential effects.
Italian fishers unload a fishing net aboard a trawler during a fishing trip in the Tyrrhenian Sea in April 2020. Fishing subsidies are resulting in serious overfishing.
(AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)
Everyone who cares about marine biodiversity, fish, fishers, coastal communities and fishing industry workers of today and tomorrow must push for the end of fisheries subsidies.
As climate change warms northern rivers and changes precipitation patterns, some types of cold-loving fish are failing.
Oceans are teeming with life and are connected to society through history and culture, shipping and economic activity, geopolitics and recreation.
(Shutterstock)
International law does not meaningfully address biodiversity conservation in the high seas. We risk losing marine species before we have a chance to identify and understand them.
A school of convict tang (Acanthurus triostegus) swim on Kiritimati’s dead reefs after the 2015–16 marine heatwave.
(Kevin Bruce)
Microscopic ocean phytoplankton feed a “biological pump” that carries carbon from the surface to deep waters. Scientists have found that this process stores much more carbon than previously thought.
Biodiversity is often highest in places with human activity. The fishing industry has shown we can often have it both ways: maintain important livelihoods while protecting precious marine life.
One of the newly discovered sixgilled sawshark species (Pliotrema kajae).
Simon Weigmann