Focus on Arts and Ecology

Discarded eggs and tiny juvenile animals could otherwise contribute vital income to struggling coastal communities. 

By Zubaida Mabuno Ismail, March 13, 2026

For thousands of coastal Ghanaians, artisanal fishing is a livelihood difficult to replace.

Centenary Cidi Ocloo, who has been fishing for 17 years, says the activity is much more than just a way to make ends meet. The sea and the three landing beaches in Ghana’s Keta district have become permanent fixtures in his life.

“I used to follow my father and his siblings to the shores as a child,” Ocloo tells Dialogue Earth. “There were times I would join them during hauling or simply swim while they worked.”

As Ocloo grew up he began coming every day to fish with other children and to help sort the catch.

“It was fun and still is,” he says. Nowadays, though, it can be a tough way to earn a living. Nets are increasingly brought in without fish, just holding garbage and sand. “There are days we haul an empty net,” says Ocloo.

He adds that any cuttlefish eggs trapped in his net are returned to the sea immediately. This follows some local education on protecting cuttlefish given by the chief fisher at his landing beach.

Ghana runs on seafood

The average Ghanaian eats 20-25 kg of fish a year, higher than the global average of 20 kg and many other West African nations.

To supply the catch, the country has a sizeable fishing industry, including scores of trawlers and industrial vessels. But it’s small-scale artisanal fishers that are the backbone of the sector. They put to sea in more than 12,700 canoes, operating out of nearly 200 fishing villages, using beach seine, lobster, gill and purse seine nets.

These artisanal fishers produce about 70% of the marine fish landed in Ghana, according to a 2023 paper. And around three-quarters of all the fish landed are consumed in country.

The fishing industry transcends nutrition and commerce in Ghana, serving as a cornerstone of social and cultural identity in coastal areas like Tema, Takoradi and Chorkor.

The sea governs the daily existence of people here, acting less like a simple resource and more like a generational legacy that fosters communal unity.

This precious resource has been under pressure for a long time. A 2015 research paper found that contrary to the rules, almost all artisanal and industrial vessels operate in the shallow parts of the coast. These practices have degraded breeding sites and depleted fishery resources, the paper says.

To make matters worse, Ghana’s fishers could be throwing away over a million US dollars’ worth of potential seafood annually by catching and discarding tiny, early-life-stage organisms before they can grow to sellable size.

That’s what a six-month study of the country’s beach seine net fisheries has found. It investigated catches on three landing beaches in Ghana, including Dzelukofe where Ocloo fishes.

Bycatch problems

Beach seines are a popular fishing gear along the coast. These nets are set in the water with a canoe and then hauled in from the shore.

The gear consists of two lines to be pulled in, two wings of net and a “cod end” in the middle. The wings have floats at the top and lead weights at the bottom, so the net hangs from the water’s surface down to the seabed.

The net is set in a curve by the canoe and hauled in by a team of upwards of 20 people. This leaves enclosed fish no option but to swim into the cod end as the net is usually hauled along the seabed, dragging along anything in its way.

Beach seines in Ghana can catch a lot of fish. They also catch quite a lot of garbage, plastics, sand, seaweed and anything else within the area the net is dragged through.

Everything besides the fish is left on the shores to dry out or rot. But often, nestled among this detritus, are eggs and tiny invertebrates, too small to be noticed by most people.

Margaret Fafa Akwetey has noticed.

The lecturer at Ghana’s University of Cape Coast led the six-month study into beach seining. She and her team found thousands of animals discarded from many different species. Three-quarters of the discards were juveniles or early life stages of species that are commercially important, such as cuttlefish, bivalves and crustaceans.

“Some 80 species [and] 20,545 individuals were recorded during the dry season,” Akwetey says. “While 75 species comprising 8,351 individuals were recorded during the wet season.”

Extrapolating from these figures, Akwetey estimates that some 8 million cuttlefish eggs may have been discarded through beach seining along Ghana’s 550 km coastline between August 2022 and February 2023.

“And when you want to translate this into organisms, considering natural mortality and every form of mortality, you are still looking at over 80,000 organisms that could have grown into a lot of cuttlefish,” she tells Dialogue Earth.

In her paper, she estimates the tonnes of lost potential adult cuttlefish could have generated USD 800,000 locally and USD 1.9 million in export.

Beach seining happens throughout the week on 315 landing beaches in Ghana, with most communities only pausing on Tuesdays. Apart from during closed seasons, “there’s fishing as long as the weather is good. Therefore, we are discarding many organisms,” says Akwetey.

Complicating the issue, many of the animals found in the study were attached to plastics. Clams had attached themselves to bottles, lids or polythene. Eggs were attached to plastic debris of all kinds as well as found in the sand.

“Fish, clams etcetera typically cling to rocks, macroalgae, reefs and other organisms … However, if we do not have a lot of [these] in the marine ecosystem, these organisms will attach to other things,” Akwetey says.

Ghana seeks to protect fish, and fishers

Ghana’s fish populations have long been under pressure from illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. The problem reached such levels that the EU issued a second yellow card warning to the country in 2021, saying it might restrict trade with Ghana if things do not improve.

Straightforward overfishing has also been a problem. Ghana first implemented a ban for trawlers in 2016 that was extended in 2019 to include artisanal fishers. Last year, industrial trawlers were banned for all of July and August, semi-industrial inshore vessels for July, while artisanal canoe fishers were exempted. In January of this year, the government announced it was again considering exempting artisanal fishers, who have long complained about its impact on their livelihoods.

Ocloo says there is always a “bumper harvest” after the closed season, but artisanal fishers like him struggle when they are part of the closure. Although he believes it should be maintained to protect fish stocks.

Seth Kedey, public relations officer of the Ghana National Canoe Fishermen Council, says there are more efforts afoot to protect fisheries and those who rely on them in the district of Keta where he works.

“Here in Keta, we place moratoriums on new canoes to reduce overfishing and protect juveniles and marine biodiversity,” he tells Dialogue Earth. “We are in a discussion with the government to declare a portion of the marine area as a marine protected area.”

Reducing bycatch could also help Ghana’s ocean life. But while fishers at Dzelukofe landing beach are aware of the impact, their peers elsewhere in Keta and in the Central region’s Cape Coast are less so.

Akwetey suggests awareness-raising campaigns could be a win for fishers and the environment.

Fishers know it is illegal to harvest sea turtles and return them if they are trapped in their nets, she points out. “Let’s employ the same strategy to persuade them to put the bycatch back into the ocean.”

Escalating conflicts show that renewables are not just a climate option, they are a security strategy, writes Panama’s former energy secretary. 

By Rosilena Lindo, March 13, 2026

The conflict that erupted on 28 February between the US, Israel and Iran is shaking global energy markets.

In just a few days, the escalation has led to attacks on ships and partial blockades in the Strait of Hormuz, through which around 20% of the world’s oil supplies pass. Key liquefied natural gas facilities in Qatar and refineries in Saudi Arabia have also been temporarily paralysed by attacks. Oil and gas prices have risen accordingly.

Although the epicentre of the crisis is in the Middle East, its effects will also be felt in Latin America and the Caribbean, a region in the midst of a rapid transition to clean energy.

The current energy volatility could have contradictory effects on that transition. On the one hand, logistical delays can make investments in clean energy more expensive. On the other, rising fossil fuel prices can strengthen the economic competitiveness of renewable energy.

Latin America and the Caribbean is starting from a relatively favourable position. Around 70% of the region’s electricity generation comes from renewable sources. Investment in clean energy in the region reached USD 70 billion in 2025, according to the International Energy Agency. However, the agency estimates it will be necessary to mobilise around USD 150 billion annually by 2030, in order to decarbonise the energy sector in line with the region’s targets.

The potential exists. According to the business data analyst BNamericas, the region has approximately 1,094 large-scale renewable energy projects (excluding hydropower) in the early stages of development, worth a combined investment of more than USD 500 billion. Of these, 176 are either under construction or in the advanced stages of preparation.

This outlook for the region coexists with the persistence of fossil fuels. At least 190 companies in an array of countries are still exploring or developing oil and gas fields in dozens of Latin American or Caribbean countries. In addition, more than 8,800 km of oil and gas pipelines are planned – mainly in South America – as well as 19 new liquefied natural gas export terminals. In contrast, the region seems to have almost completely ruled out the construction of new coal-fired power plants.

While the impact of the current conflict on fossil fuels is clear, the more than 1,000 renewable projects under development are not immune to these disruptions either. Although the Strait of Hormuz is not a major route for renewable technology components, global logistical disruptions have significant indirect effects.

The partial blockade of the strait has raised maritime insurance costs, increased freight rates on alternative routes, and caused congestion in ports and supply chains. Most solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and inverters arriving in Latin America are exported from China via the Pacific Ocean or the eastern Indian Ocean. But disruptions elsewhere can still cause logistical delays and higher transport costs, potentially slowing down the implementation of renewable projects.

However, the energy crisis resulting from the conflict may also accelerate the transition in some contexts. Rising fossil fuel prices improve the competitiveness of renewable energy. In regions highly dependent on energy imports, this could drive the adoption of solar and wind technologies.

Examples include the expansion of solar farms in the Caribbean islands and Chile.  Many industries which previously relied on gas are increasingly switching to clean power sources such as solar thermal systems.

Geopolitical tensions also highlight a structural advantage of renewable energy: its local nature. Notwithstanding short-term logistical issues a conflict may cause, renewable power generation does not depend on vulnerable trade routes or highly concentrated markets. This strengthens the energy resilience of territories and could attract more international financing for green initiatives in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The world is undergoing a period of accelerated innovation driven by multiple crises: the Covid-19 pandemic, rising geopolitical tensions and the growing climate impact of greenhouse gas emissions.

In this context, the transition to renewable energy-based economies is not only a climate option but also a security strategy. Governments must prioritise investments in renewable energy, storage, electricity grid modernisation and transport transformation. This will not only reduce emissions but protect their populations from external shocks.

The current crises serve as a reminder that diversifying energy sources is key to building sustainable, resilient energy systems that are less vulnerable to geopolitical tensions.

Latin America and the Caribbean have an historic opportunity before them: to take advantage of this situation and consolidate their position as a strategic centre for global energy sustainability. With abundant solar, wind and hydro, as well as critical mineral resources such as lithium, the region can become an energy transition laboratory that demonstrates how to strengthen resilience to geopolitical risks while generating green jobs, inclusive prosperity and true energy sovereignty.

Rosilena Lindo

The treaty could be a huge win for ocean conservation, but the world needs to turn words on paper into action on the water, writes the president of Palau. 

By Surangel Whipps Jr, March 19, 2026

The United Nations high seas treaty opened a new chapter for global ocean conservation when it entered into force at the beginning of the year.

It is the first international agreement focused on those two-thirds of the ocean that are not controlled by any country. Also known as the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction agreement, it aims to protect and share the benefits of ocean life found there.

Now representatives from around the world must agree on the treaty’s rules when they meet for a final round of preparatory talks at the end of the month.

The past is prologue. What they accomplish at the PrepCom3 meeting could determine whether the treaty lives up to the high ambitions the world set for it through years of hard-fought negotiations.

Countries must also begin preparing the legal and administrative processes necessary to establish sustainable ocean management on the high seas, including marine protected areas. Many nations, particularly developing island nations and coastal states, have been working for years to identify and map biological hotspots where such protection will yield significant conservation and social benefits.

But it is difficult for income-constrained parties to commit to action while the delivery of the support previously pledged from partners remains in doubt. To that end, the European Union, Palau and Seychelles are co-chairing the High Ambition Coalition. This state-led initiative is made up of more than 40 diverse countries working to support the treaty’s implementation.

First and foremost, as we have learned with UN climate change negotiations, finance cannot be an afterthought if we want to realise the high seas treaty’s full potential.

To raise money, the agreement has set up three funds. One relies on donations to support representatives of developing countries to attend meetings. Another is managed by the Global Environment Facility, an existing multilateral fund for environmental action. The final “special fund” will draw on mandatory contributions from developed countries, as well as potential revenue from marine genetic resources and donations from public and private sources.

The latter two funds are for capacity building, assisting developing states to implement the treaty, supporting Indigenous and locally led programmes, and other projects. Into the special fund developed countries will be required to pay an amount equal to 50% of the contribution they make to the treaty’s overall budget. This top-up is designed to build confidence in the system and finance rapid implementation.

Yet with the treaty’s inaugural Conference of the Parties (COP1) fast approaching, key financial decisions are still outstanding. Countries have not agreed on the size of the first budget to be adopted; whether contributions should be based on the UN scale of assessments; if limits on individual contributions are needed; or how to address the special circumstances of small island developing states and least developed countries.

A fund without predictable, assessed contributions risks becoming symbolic rather than functional, particularly for countries that rely on it to build capacity, access technology and participate meaningfully in implementation. With the treaty now in force, financial obligations are no longer hypothetical. They will take effect as soon as the first budget is adopted.

There is also the practical problem of what entities will hold and manage the money. Without interim financial arrangements, even early contributions could be delayed, undermining trust when it is most needed. Finally, coherence is essential. The special fund must work in close coordination with the other mechanisms and the Global Environment Facility to be effective.

Beyond financing, other crucial institutional arrangements must be agreed at PrepCom3 and adopted at COP1. For the treaty to work in practice, its institutions must function together.

Establishing marine protected areas, for example, requires a functional Scientific and Technical Body to assess proposals and a digital clearing-house to share data and decisions transparently. Similarly, the treaty’s provision for Environmental Impact Assessments demands clear standards and guidelines. Without them, implementation is likely to be fragmented, contested and far too slow.

At its core, successful implementation of the high seas treaty will come down to collaboration. Its institutions will need to work closely with the existing laws, agreements, organisations and financial systems that already govern the world’s oceans.

It is a heavy lift and time is short. But the swift ratification of the treaty shows that global cooperation is still possible. Now the world needs to turn words on paper into action on the water.

Without financing that is accessible and adequate from day one, the countries on the frontlines of the global ocean crisis, and the ones we need most to bring the treaty to life, will be shut out of the process.

The decisions taken at PrepCom3 and COP1 will determine whether the agreement delivers the benefits of a restored ocean system equitably to all global citizens – or quietly slips into obsolescence.

Surangel Whipps Jr

The Jamapa Glacier retreat is climate change in action, and an extinction affecting rivers, rural communities, industries and marine ecosystems. 

By Rodrigo Soberanes, March 6, 2026

At 9am on the final day of May 2025, 70-year-old mountaineer Hilario Álvarez stopped at the edge of Mexico’s last glacier. And he listened. There it was, at an altitude of 5,300 metres: the soft crackling of melting ice. He squinted to watch the drops of water, sliding down stalactites hanging beneath the ice sheet before disappearing into the porous soil of Citlaltépetl, the highest mountain in Mexico.

It is from this ice on Citlaltépetl – also known as the Pico de Orizaba volcano – that a river springs. Across hundreds of kilometres, it touches the lives of millions of people before flowing into the Gulf of Mexico. That May, Álvarez inspected a cavity that had formed between the ice and the earth, large enough for an adult to crawl inside. “Last year, there was a little more [ice] surface area,” he says. “Today, there is less and it is thinner.”

What is clear is that the Jamapa Glacier has reached the point of no return. A 2024 National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) study, poetically entitled Announcement of an approaching death, compared past projections for the glacier’s evolution with the current reality. It concluded that, by the end of this decade, the climatic conditions necessary for Jamapa to continue functioning as a glacier would only occur at altitudes similar to Citlaltépetl’s peak.

The mid-point of these requisite climatic conditions for any glacier is called the equilibrium line. Above the line, the glacier accumulates more ice than is lost through melting; below the line, the opposite is true. As Jamapa’s equilibrium line continues to rise, there will be changes that force a reconsideration of whether or not it is still technically a glacier. That is according to Guillermo Ontiveros, the study’s lead researcher. “When do we say that a glacier ceases to exist? There is still no consensus,” he tells Dialogue Earth.

What does seem inevitable, according to Ontiveros, is that Jamapa will fragment into two ice bodies, one high and one low. That division could happen at any moment, and “could already be interpreted as the death of the glacier”.

Over his lifetime, Álvarez has seen all but one of the 14 glaciers that once existed on this mountain disappear. That morning, the sounds beneath the ice felt like another farewell.

“Perhaps we will become extinct together.”

Signs of climate change

During that same mid-2025 ascent, Álvarez noticed something he had never experienced since his first climb of Pico de Orizaba in December 1968, when he was only 13. He felt “warm rain” falling on the glacier. It left the ice washed and shiny, exposed directly to the sun’s rays.

A 2024 study documenting the glacier’s accelerated retreat says its surface area was 0.46 sq km in 2019. By 2024, it had shrunk to 0.37 sq km, and the crevasse under the ice at its edges had deepened. Importantly, the air temperature at the bottom of the ice body and within its accumulation zone had also risen steadily, the study notes.

As he descended, Álvarez followed the path of the meltwater. The weather behaved “like never before”, he says. There were blizzards and sudden changes. At 5,000 m, it began to rain, with lightning, in a place where it once only snowed.

Experts say this is a sign that the zero isotherm – the invisible line above which precipitation usually falls as snow – has shifted upwards. “Fifty years ago, it didn’t rain at 4,000 m. Now it rains up to 5,600 m,” says Álvarez.

Downpours like the one he experienced change everything: they cause landslides, erode the mountain and alter its morphology. They leave behind moraines – marks on rocks that reveal the presence of glaciers that have since disappeared.

Rain, once rare at these heights, is part of the glacier’s final climate. Meanwhile, its meltwater flows along an underground river towards the Gulf of Mexico.

Human impact

Once it leaves the mountain, the Jamapa enters forests of Mexican mountain pine (Pinus hartwegii). According to two local sources who did not want to be identified over safety concerns, illegal logging and timber trafficking groups operate here. Some of these groups even stop those who climb the volcano and charge a “right of way” fee.

Mountaineers and expedition members who spend the night in the Piedra Grande lodge, located on the north side of the volcano at an altitude of 4,200 m, hear vehicles passing along clandestine trails all night. One expert with decades of experience in the area, who also did not want to be named, says there are at least 30 such routes in the 20,000 hectares that make up the Pico de Orizaba National Park’s protected area. Logs are transported through here to cities in the two states that divide the mountain, Puebla and Veracruz.

Further down, the river reaches settlements in the municipality of La Perla, such as Vaquería and Nuevo Jacal. According to official data recorded in 2020, more than 55% of La Perla’s population live in extreme poverty and almost 40% live in moderate poverty.

The Pico de Orizaba National Park’s director Armando Fuentes tells Dialogue Earth there are 24 water committees in the area, made up of residents participating in reforestation and land care. He acknowledges that illegal logging remains a serious problem. The park’s former director, Luis Álvarez, says many farming families make ends meet by facilitating passage of this timber.

Mexico’s National Forestry Commission (Conafor) has established forest loss as a factor that directly contributes to global heating: the carbon that would have been absorbed by felled trees becomes atmospheric. This heating melts glaciers.

However, Mexico’s environment ministry (Semarnat) says deforestation is the national park’s biggest problem, and that it is being compounded by the water running down the slopes and elevated sections of the mountain, causing severe impacts for the flora, fauna and soil. Landslides, Semarnat says, are the expression of the direct relationship between glacier melt and damage to the surrounding forest. 

One of these landslides formed during Hilario Álvarez’s descent. A loud crackling from the earth announced the fall of rocks, stones, mud and water. 

Signs from the sea

After its course has run more than 300 km, beyond the mountain forests, Jamapa’s meltwater joins the Cotaxtla, one of four great rivers that originate in the Pico de Orizaba National Park. It then flows through regions of fruit crops, sugar cane and extensive livestock farming. “For more than 500 years, there has been a very strong link between human communities and this river,” Jordi Vera, a researcher specialising in water consumption in the region, tells Dialogue Earth.

On its way to the sea, the river supplies water to more than half a million people across at least 34 municipalities. It also passes by large industrial operations that extract groundwater, explains Vera.

The researcher predicts that the lower basin areas “will have to adapt” to the river’s new state, that of a seasonal flow that is dependent on the rain. “People are already very concerned, because it is their most immediate source and they will no longer have water by gravity,” Vera continues. “They will have to pump it from nearby streams. Other strategies are being discussed, such as adjusting consumption and reusing water.”

This is reinforced in Announcement of an approching death, which states that the glacier’s extinction “will affect the availability of water supply” in the Jamapa River Basin.

Finally, the Jamapa flows into the Gulf of Mexico at the edge of its coral reef system. The linear distance between Citlaltépetl and this point is 110 km, but the stream of water that began as meltwater to become a torrent of sediment, nutrients and energy, feeding coral reefs and sustaining rich marine biodiversity, has been on a winding 368 km journey.

As Leonardo Ortiz, a biologist at the University of Veracruz, tells Dialogue Earth: “The glacier and the reefs have been connected for about 10,000 years.” In 2019, Ortiz led a team that discovered 23 new reefs on the central coast of Veracruz.

This team also participated in a citizen lawsuit that reached Mexico’s supreme court. Its historic ruling in February 2022 ordered a halt to the expansion of the port of Veracruz, due to its environmental impact. The case set key precedents and is considered “a turning point” for environmental law in Mexico according to the lawyer who led the 10-year litigation, Xavier Martínez. He describes to Dialogue Earth how, for the first time, the court used the “principle of prevention” and “revoked all permits and ordered a holistic and comprehensive evaluation”. The mega-project was deemed environmentally damaging, therefore infringing the human right to a healthy environment.

Today, these reefs are facing the disappearance of Jamapa, which will reduce the river’s nutrient supply. “It’s as if we were using the state of the reef and the state of the glacier as indicators of how the system is functioning,” says Ortiz. “It’s a symptom that tells you: this is happening in the glacier. But if it’s happening in the glacier, it’s happening even more intensely everywhere else.”

It is difficult to predict just what follows from the absence of the glacier. But what can be said, Ortiz notes, is that the disappearance of the glacier will affect the ecological niche of the reefs – their conditions for existence and reproduction.

Amid wind, rain and thunder, Hilario Álvarez was lucky to complete his 2025 descent from the glacier safely: “There was a lot of very strong lightning close by.”

He knew then that his body was no longer what it once was – the mountain had exacted a heavier toll than it did when he first climbed it as a boy. But with three decades of high-difficulty ascents behind him, Álvarez says the “unpredictable and beautiful” Citlaltépetl will likely summon him again.

Whether the Jamapa Glacier will still be there is less certain.

Rodrigo Soberanes