Focus on Arts and Ecology

The body’s pathogen fighters can act as surveillance forces that ferry information from the gut and fat deposits to the brain. 

By Gemma Conroy, 28 May 2025

Special-agent immune cells carry information about the gut and fat tissue deep into the brain. This surveillance system, uncovered in mice, is crucial to the brain’s control of behaviour such as pursuit of food , researchers report today in Nature 1 .

Similar immune cells are known to populate the membranes covering the brain, but the newly identified cells have molecular traits that give them entry into the core of the organ. Their function is shaped by diet and the microbiome; without them, even hungry mice are slow to eat.

“It’s very exciting to see that from an organ that was considered completely isolated from the immune system,” says Michal Schwartz, a neuroimmunologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, who was not involved in the study.

Neighbourhood watch

Almost every organ in the body houses its own immune cells . Researchers have long thought that most of the healthy brain’s ‘adaptive’ immune cells — those that target specific pathogens — reside in the meninges , the three protective membranes enclosing the brain.

Previous studies have hinted that adaptive immune cells called T cells might dwell inside the brain itself under stable conditions. But determining whether these cells are truly distinct from those in the meninges has been a challenge, says Tomomi Yoshida, a neuroimmunologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and a co-author of the latest work. “They didn’t really compare and contrast that element,” she says.

To gain a more definitive answer, Yoshida and her colleagues spent five years searching for T cells across the entire mouse brain. They found that T cells are concentrated in a hotspot in the subfornical organ, a structure in the centre of the brain that regulates a range of bodily processes, including eating and drinking . The scientists then sampled tissue from the human subfornical organ, where they also found T cells.

In both mouse and human brains, the subfornical T cells were distinct from those found in the meninges. They produced more proteins that enabled them to reside in brain tissue and secreted more immune-signalling proteins known as cytokines under normal conditions.

Curiously, the researchers found that the T cells from inside mouse brains were very similar to those in the animals’ fat deposits. To understand this similarity, they gave some mice a high-fat diet. These mice ended up with more T cells in their fat and brain tissues than did mice that ate standard food — evidence of a link between fat mass and brain T-cell populations. After mice on the same diet fasted for 48 hours, the number of T cells in their brains rose and the number in their fat fell, suggesting that food intake affects the number of T cells travelling to the brain.

Gut–brain connection

Next, the researchers used antibiotics to deplete populations of gut microorganisms in some mice. These animals’ levels of brain T cells decreased, which could mean that the microbiome influences immune-cell populations.

Finally, the researchers assessed the potential role of the brain-resident T cells. Hungry mice that had been genetically engineered to lack the T cells took longer to find and consume food than did controls, suggesting that brain T cells play a part in feeding behaviour.

More work is needed to uncover the mechanisms that enable brain T cells to influence eating and other functions, says Emanuela Pasciuto, a neuroimmunologist at the Vlaams Institute of Biotechnology in Antwerp, Belgium. This would require developing a whole new suite of tools that capture more than correlations, she adds. “That would be my wish experiment.”

Yoshida says the team plans to unravel the role of brain-resident T cells in more detail and to find out how they interact with other cells.

References

(Sources: Nature)

Access agreements allowing other countries’ boats into their waters are driving local people to despair, but change may be coming. 

By Kebba Jeffang, May 1, 2025

At sunrise most days, Lamin Sarr launches his wooden fishing canoe into the Atlantic from The Gambia’s Gunjur Beach, partaking in the same trade as his father and grandfather. But Sarr says the ocean feels emptier these days.

The fish that sustained Sarr’s village in the past are vanishing, replaced by imposing trawlers that he blames for catching what remains.

Each outing is a battle against the waves, but also against often-opaque agreements between governments and industrial fleets. Local fishers like Sarr say such agreements leave them with little hope.

West Africa’s fisheries are vital for both nutrition and employment. Relevant data is scarce, but a 2015 study estimated 6.7 million people in the region were dependent on the industry for food and work.

The trawlers that compete with West Africa’s local fishers are owned by Chinese and European firms. As detailed in a 2023 Amnesty International report, these industrial fleets have been accused of using small-mesh nets that catch juvenile fish, and employing destructive fishing methods, such as bottom trawling, leading to a depletion of stocks.

Sarr, who is president of the Fishers Association at Gunjur Beach, paints a grim picture of the prospects for him and his colleagues. He tells Dialogue Earth of an incident in which a trawler ran over a fishing boat, damaging it and destroying two valuable, 60-horsepower engines. Near the coastal village of Sanyang, a similar incident last year reportedly led to one death and two people missing. “Local fishers now flee at the sight of these trawlers, fearing for their safety,” says Sarr.

The Amnesty International report claimed these trawlers were overexploiting Gambian waters, significantly enough to shrink fish stocks and push up local prices. Sarr’s experience reflects this. The price of a basket of bonga fish – once an affordable staple – has leapt higher and higher in recent years, before almost tripling between 2021 and 2025, from 1,200 Gambian dalasi (USD 16.6) to 3,000.

“How can we sell that to poor people at our markets?” Sarr asks. “The destruction caused by these trawlers cannot be measured. People are losing their lives, the fishing grounds are being destroyed, and our boats and nets are being damaged.”

Opaque access agreements

Many countries in West Africa have signed access agreements that allow foreign vessels to fish in their waters – some are legally entitled to fish off Gunjur Beach.

Research published in 2015, led by University of British Columbia scientists, attempted to calculate the average annual fees paid by the EU and China to access West African waters for fishing during 2000-2010. The report’s authors faced several data hurdles – the “poor transparency” of China’s agreements and lack of data on illegal fishing, for example – but ultimately concluded that these access fees represented less than 10% of the value of what each fleet was catching.

The researchers tried to estimate the legal and illegal catch of these fleets and calculated that the EU fee is equivalent to around 8% of the value of all the fish they caught. The Chinese fee was around 4%.

Much of the detail of this fishing is hard to discern, with information on agreements, boat ownership and true catches often not made public and not discussed openly by officials making deals.

“The government’s silence on these deals suggests they are prioritising foreign interests over local livelihoods and environmental sustainability,” says Madi Jobarteh, a Gambia-based anti-corruption activist who founded the Edward Francis Small Centre for Rights and Justice. “Local fisherfolks face a clear and present danger to their livelihoods simply because of the unchecked presence of more advanced and bigger trawlers in our waters.”

He believes that monitoring of compliance with the agreement is weak, and without this, foreign fleets can operate with impunity.

The push for transparency

A growing movement across West Africa is seeking more transparency in fisheries to deal with problems in the sector.

The Gambia-European Union Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Agreement (SFPA) came into force in 2019. It gives vessels from Spain, Greece and France permission to fish in Gambian waters for tuna and black hake. The deal is due to expire in June, adding urgency to debates over its benefits and problems. The country is also already party to the Port State Measures Agreement, along with other West African nations including Senegal, Ghana and Mauritania. This legally binding, international agreement is designed to tackle illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing.

In Senegal, the government published a list of authorised fishing vessels in May last year, which was well-received by transparency advocates. Officials have also been receptive to suggestions the country should update its 2015 Maritime Fisheries Code to align with the Fisheries Transparency Initiative (FiTI).
Introduced by the government of Mauritania in 2015, the FiTI upholds a standard for fisheries transparency that nations can sign up to. Senegal had joined the initiative but was delisted in August last year, with the FiTI saying its government had taken “encouraging” action but ultimately failed to take the mandatory first steps in implementing transparency standards. Some in Senegal’s civil society and fishing sectors are now pushing for Senegal to restart the membership process.

Another setback came in November, when the European Union allowed its fisheries deal with Senegal to expire, saying the country had not done enough to combat IUU fishing.

This means EU boats should leave Senegalese waters, and Senegal will no longer receive any financial contributions from the EU. In April, however, an investigation by the journalism group Follow the Money alleged at least a fifth of the boats fishing off Senegal under the national flag are owned by European companies.

Senegal’s neighbour to the north is faring comparatively better: “Mauritania has joined the FiTI and published nearly five reports, showing its commitment to transparency,” says Bassirou Diarra, an ocean campaigner for the Environmental Justice Foundation.

Ghana committed to joining the FiTI in July last year but has yet to submit its application. Its fisheries sector still has problems with illegal fishing and labour abuse, according to Clement Kadogbe, who works on human rights in business for Ghana’s Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice: “Some of these challenges still rear their ugly heads, because of the lack of political will of leaders of the various countries.”

Subsidising environmental damage

Fishing subsidies, particularly those originating from China or the European Union, are often blamed for fuelling overfishing.

These subsidies, worth billions of dollars globally, include discounts for fuel and vessel purchases, loans and other support. Some subsidies are targeted at encouraging sustainable practices, but others drive fishers to catch more than the ocean can replenish.

Max Schmid, the Environmental Justice Foundation’s chief operating officer, says these subsidies can make ongoing fishing artificially profitable for foreign boats off West Africa: “In turn, this facilitates overfishing and illegal fishing. As operators chase fewer fish, some turn to human trafficking, forced, bonded and slave labour to keep costs down.”

Dialogue Earth consulted Rashid Sumaila, a professor of fisheries and ocean economics at the University of British Colombia, Canada. He also says subsidies fuel overcapacity, depleting fish stocks vital to local economies.

“By incentivising large-scale exploitation, [subsidies] displace artisanal fishers, reducing catches and driving unemployment among youth dependent on fisheries for livelihoods,” he said. “Moreover, the lack of transparency and regulation linked to these subsidies fosters IUU fishing, undermining governance and food security in the region.”

A global solution to West Africa’s problem?

Fisheries subsidies are not just a West African problem – there is a global push to limit the environmental damage they can cause.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) adopted an Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies in June 2022, which aims to prohibit subsidies that lead to overfishing. For the agreement to enter into force, two-thirds of WTO members must now deposit an “instrument of acceptance” with the organisation. As of April 2025,  97 of the 166 members had done so. Those that have include Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and The Gambia.

WTO members are attempting to negotiate for yet stronger measures to further reign in the subsidies that cause overfishing, but progress has been difficult.

Nevertheless, campaigners hope this global-level change can help The Gambia and its neighbours.

“Governments spend about USD 22 billion annually on harmful subsidies that drive overfishing,” says Megan Jungwiwattanaporn, an environmental policy officer at The Pew Charitable Trusts in the US. “The time is now for WTO members to finalise the agreement and begin protecting West African fisheries.”

For fishers in places like Gunjur, the hope is that international pressure and local advocacy will lead to stricter regulations – and that these rules will be followed.

“We need real enforcement, not just promises,” Sarr says. Without this kind of action, the livelihoods of millions of West Africans will remain at risk.

Proponents of modifying the ocean to battle climate change have rising hopes for their biomass sinking plans, but critics fear the environmental impacts. 

By Daniel Cressey, May 12, 2025

Scientists and entrepreneurs from across the world gathered in Bucharest earlier this year to discuss a temptingly simple idea to battle climate change.

Gathering up plant scraps left over from agriculture and sinking them into the depths of the ocean could, they believe, take carbon that nature has locked up in plants and put it where it cannot escape.

Proponents believe the simplicity of the concept sidesteps some of the issues that have dogged other attempts to take geoengineering into the ocean. They are hoping a new standard defining how they should operate could fuel interest in this previously niche form of carbon removal. If it does, huge bundles of crop waste could one day be jettisoned from vessels in the Black Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, and money could flow to those doing it.

But significant questions remain about the environmental impact and how long carbon stored in this way will remain trapped. Opponents say geoengineering in general is a dangerous distraction from tackling climate change, and that the environmental impact of specific concepts – including this one – are often understated or underexplored in the rush to make money via the market for carbon credits.

The ocean for geoengineering

The ocean takes up somewhere between a quarter and a third of the current carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning and other sources, carbon dioxide that could otherwise be in the atmosphere, warming the planet. It has absorbed about 90% of the excess heat produced by these human activities too.

This outsized role in the climate system – and, more generally, the fact it covers most of the planet – makes it a tempting target for those who want to place a finger on the scales to tilt the Earth’s systems against warming.

Morgan Raven works on the carbon cycle at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the US. She notes that studies of Cretaceous rocks show large deposits of organic matter in the ocean helped the Earth cool during a past “hothouse” event.

“This is how the Earth responds on a 100,000-year time scale,” she says. The question for geoengineers: “Can we make it a 100-year time scale so it’s useful for humans?”

Raven now works with Carboniferous, a company looking to sink agricultural waste, such as straw stalks and leaves, into the ocean. The concept was recently given the title Marine Anoxic Carbon Storage, or Macs, at that workshop in Romania.

While geoengineering via carbon dioxide removal has been criticised for distracting effort from emissions reductions, supporters cite the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2022 conclusion that carbon dioxide removal is “unavoidable if net-zero CO2 or GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions are to be achieved”.

Raven says: “All of us are frustrated and disappointed with the fact that we are completely failing to control our emissions, and that is the big lever that has to happen. There are acute effects, [such as] some of these threshold changes in the system that are coming at us, and so I see this as a sort of emergency response tool to avoid some of those. But obviously, none of this matters if we don’t stop putting it in the air.”

But the ocean has proven a difficult place for would-be geoengineers. Operating at sea is, in general, harder than working on land, and there are complex and sometimes overlapping jurisdictions and regulators governing what can and cannot be done there.

Companies looking to undertake geoengineering need money. To-date, that has generally meant selling carbon credits to companies looking to go green by compensating for carbon emissions they are responsible for.

This has led to a voluntary carbon market – or markets– where companies claiming to have reduced the amount of carbon in the atmosphere sell carbon credits to companies that worry they have increased it. To try and make these trades more robust, various businesses have sprung up offering standards for such activity.

One of them is Puro.earth. It issues what it calls Corcs (CO2 Removal Certificates) for each tonne of carbon removed from the atmosphere and sequestered safely. These are given out to firms that meet its standard in five terrestrial forms of carbon dioxide removal, including the production of biochar.

Currently there are no marine projects that have been given Puro’s vote of carbon confidence – though that is about to change.

Getting standardised

In January, Puro.earth unveiled its methodology for how carbon could be removed from the atmosphere via “ocean storage of biomass”. It is also looking at certifying carbon directly captured from the air and stored in the ocean.

The latter has several relatively complex steps, involving applying electricity to water and then going through various chemical processes to store carbon in ocean waters. Puro summarises the former in a sentence: “The methodology focuses on depositing sustainable biomass into permanently oxygen-depleted (anoxic) ocean basins where natural seafloor conditions allow for durable CO2 storage.”

Marianne Tikkanen, co-founder of Puro.earth, says: “From the beginning, we’ve understood that the ocean has good potential for removals, but for a methodology, a good level of technology maturity is also needed.”

The methodology, she claims, makes it easier for a market to evolve around such carbon credits. For biomass sinking, there is a narrow scope. “That scope makes the environmental impacts very contained, and it is a safe and conservative way to start exploiting the ocean’s removal capacity,” says Tikkanen.

She adds: “Our mission is to make it economical to remove carbon. It’s clear that a new industry needs to be born where there are parties who pay for carbon removal to happen, and then there are parties who can make it happen.”

The methodology is currently scheduled for public release in June. 

The players: Carboniferous and Rewind

Carboniferous is one of the companies placed to take advantage of this certification. It is targeting the Orca Basin in the Gulf of Mexico. If it receives permission from the US government, it hopes to run a trial depositing 20 tonnes of biomass there, an amount Raven describes as “tiny”.

“At current prices, it’s 20 bucks worth of CO2 removal,” says Raven, who is the company’s chief science officer. “It is a large physical amount, but you can picture a tonne as being about a meter and a half cubed.”

On the other side of the Earth, another company is looking to a different oxygen-free sea.

Rewind wants to drop crop waste 2 kilometres into the Black Sea, which has famously anoxic depths trapped below a more oxygenated surface layer. It is, the company says, “the optimal environment allowing affordable, environmentally safe, gigaton-scale carbon removal in this decade”.

Ram Amar, its CEO, says the company has applied for a permit for a 100-tonne trial in the Black Sea from Romania. He adds that the Danube River is thought to carry about 100 tonnes of organic matter into the Black Sea every hour.

“100 tonnes is really nanoscale in the Black Sea, but we hope that it will still allow us to measure very localised changes in the water chemistry and biology that we could use to forecast what would happen when we go to the next level of scale: 1,000 tonnes, and then 10,000 tonnes,” says Amar.

The question of how quickly they can scale up is a crucial one for marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) companies – both so they can have a real impact on mitigating climate change, and so they can sell carbon credits and remain solvent.

“I don’t think anyone’s going to leap into doing a million tonnes [of biomass deposition] overnight by any means,” says Chris Vivian, an independent consultant and co-chair of a working group on mCDR at the Joint Group of Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Environmental Protection (Gesamp).

“I think they all need to do trials. And even if you look through the Puro.earth protocol, there’s a lot of work they would need to do before they could go to any scale where they could potentially claim significant carbon credits.”

Sinking biomass may be “relatively straightforward” compared to some mCDR options, but monitoring, reporting and verification are still big issues, Vivian notes. He also cites the need for public acceptance, and wider public knowledge in order to obtain that.

Environmental concerns

The depths of the Black Sea are devoid of oxygen and saturated with hydrogen sulphide – a state known as euxinic. These waters are unfriendly enough to traditional marine life that wooden ships that sank to the bottom thousands of years ago have remained remarkably preserved, their hulls protected from the voracious creatures that would devour them in most other seas.

This has often led to characterisation of these depths as a “dead zone”. But there is life here.

In a 2021 paper, researchers described how small invertebrates seem to have evolved to live under the challenging conditions at the bottom of the Black Sea.

And in 2019, another team demonstrated the presence of “deep red fluorescence” in the anoxic waters caused by bacteria. The lead author of that research, Cristiana Callieri, told Dialogue Earth she was “absolutely against” plans to sink biomass into the area. She says environments such as the Black Sea “are a reservoir of high, but as yet unexplored microbial biodiversity”, and the microbiomes “would be destroyed by a catastrophic event such as throwing biomass into the sea”.

“One cannot for a good cause destroy an ecosystem by upsetting the existing balance,” says Callieri, who is a marine researcher at the CNR-IRSA Water Research Institute in Verbania, Italy.

Proponents insist that environmental impacts can be minimised by targeting bodies of water largely devoid of large life forms, and that the biomass may even serve as food for microbes that can live in these extreme conditions.

There is also an admission that the lack of what biologists call charismatic megafauna – your whales, sharks, etc – in anoxic zones brings more public acceptance. Disruption of microbial communities might be an easier sell to the public – and regulators – than the kind of animals that appear in children’s books about the ocean. The top question on Carboniferous’s FAQ page, for example, is: “Will the biomass bonk whales on the head when it’s transported to the basin?”. (Answer: no, and “we think this question should extend to all ocean animals”.)

Some companies have chosen other areas to deposit biomass into the ocean, and courted controversy in doing so. Perhaps the highest profile is the now-defunct firm Running Tide.

The ex-player: Running Tide

Running Tide was previously a standard bearer for the idea of helping save the planet by sinking plant matter into the seas. Its website touted plans to put buoys, made of “forestry residue” and limestone and decorated with kelp seeds, into the ocean, combining three different technologies for carbon removal into one. It sold carbon credits to major companies including Microsoft. 

But last year the company announced via social media that it was shutting down. “Ultimately the contraction in the voluntary carbon market meant that it was impossible to scale up, and without buyers beyond the Microsoft’s [sic] of the world there wasn’t a way to get financing for continued R&D [research and development],” it said.

James Kerry, of the marine conservation NGO OceanCare, is one of those who wants a precautionary approach to all these marine carbon dioxide removal efforts.

“I have not been impressed with any of the mCDR technologies that I’ve looked at. Most of them I think won’t actually work under a full life cycle analysis, but they also carry with them a considerable amount of risk, some of which would only reveal itself upon large-scale deployment,” says Kerry, who is a senior research fellow working on ocean-climate issues with a focus on geoengineering at James Cook University in Australia.

Some techniques simply do not work as advertised, he says. Biomass sinking does initially sequester carbon, he adds, but a 1,000-year time frame for locking it up is “optimistic”, and it is problematic that the Puro.earth draft standard suggests monitoring for only 15 years after deposition. (After Kerry spoke to Dialogue Earth, Puro.earth lowered the requirement for carbon storage in the methodology from 1,000+ years to 200+ years in April, following input from its advisory board.)

Other questions also remain to be answered. Critics say the crop residues that might be sunk into the ocean could be better used to return nutrients to soils on land, and question how monitoring could work in practice, as well as the ultimate economics.

But proponents are pushing forward, and believe they can dodge the issues that sank Running Tide.

The key, Rewind CEO Amar tells Dialogue Earth, is balancing the environmental safety and scientific rigour of this more experimental phase with the need to scale up for climate change mitigation.

“The risks that ocean ecosystems bear by inaction is much larger than the pace that we want to increase pilot scales. The Danube does a million tonnes per year [of biomass into the Black Sea], and we can definitely get to that scale with very, very, very small risk within a few years. But if we do nothing, then in 10 years’ time, the oceans can go through a point of no return.”

Kerry is unconvinced. “I tend to call this ocean dumping of biomass, rather than ocean storage of biomass,” he says.

Clarification: This story was updated on 13 May to reflect that Puro.earth has reduced the requirement for carbon storage in the methodology from 1,000+ years to 200+ years.

To meet a global goal of protecting 30% of the ocean by 2030, governments must think small, says Rocky Sanchez Tirona of biodiversity NGO Rare. 

By Rocky Sanchez Tirona, May 28, 2025

In December 2022, representatives from nearly 200 countries around the world celebrated in Montreal. At the UN’s COP15 biodiversity talks, they had agreed a comprehensive framework to halt and reverse nature loss, including the target of protecting 30% of land and sea by 2030.

Amidst headlines about the dual crisis of climate change and disappearing biodiversity, this was a real breakthrough – for nature, but also for people.

Two and a half years later, the world is already off track.

Only 8.3% of the ocean is protected – 0.5% more than when the deal was agreed. At the current trajectory, only 9.7% of the ocean will be protected by 2030. And loose regulations and enforcement mean that many of the so-called protected areas that contribute to that number are vulnerable to destructive activities including bottom trawling.

In fact, less than 3% of the ocean is fully protected from damage caused by human activity.

The consequences of failing to protect the ocean quickly enough are grave, especially for the communities who depend on the sea for food and livelihoods. Worldwide, 113 million people, most of whom are in the Global South, depend on small-scale fisheries, most of which are in coastal waters, for food and incomes. Failure to protect coastal areas puts their food security and livelihoods at risk, with fishers having to go further and for longer periods of time to catch enough to meet their needs.

Communities themselves are now sounding the alarm. In Indonesia, members of the Indonesia Traditional Fisherfolk Union have studied and monitored illegal bottom trawling activities in their waterways and raised awareness among communities and decisionmakers. In the Philippines, small-scale fishers are asking the highest court in the country to protect municipal waters from commercial fishing. And in Honduras, local municipalities and fishing communities have asked the government to reserve the first 12 nautical miles from shore for artisanal fishing.

Protecting coastal waters effectively – and doing so quickly – will put us back on course to achieving 30×30, while also throwing a lifeline to small-scale fishers. Research shows that we need to establish approximately 190,000 small marine protected areas (MPAs) in coastal regions alone, and an additional 300 large MPAs in remote, offshore areas globally by the end of 2030 to meet the 30% target that year. That is about 85 MPAs a day. 

Efforts are already underway to enable and equip local communities to create as many local MPAs as possible. In the roughly 2,000 local communities across eight countries where my organisation Rare operates, I have seen what happens when protected areas are combined with sustainable fishing practices. Time and time again, communities see their coastal waters recover and their economies thrive.

This is how it works. A community designates an area of the ocean as highly protected – called a no-take zone. All extractive activities are banned in the area – from fishing and mining to drilling and dredging. In the surrounding areas where fishing is allowed, everyone works together to agree who gets to fish and how.

Again and again, we have found that when local people have priority rights to fish in their waters, and industrial fishing isn’t allowed, they are more likely to fish more sustainably because they feel a greater sense of ownership. They fish in the right places, use the right gear, and cooperate with each other to avoid overfishing.

The rewards for these efforts are clear. In some of our sites in the Philippines, for example, the communities co-managing their coastal waters have seen fish biomass inside their no-take reserves double within five years on average.

Fishers have also reported increased catch in areas outside the no-take zones. This happens almost everywhere.

So if MPAs are so helpful to local communities, why aren’t there more of them?

Right now, MPAs are mostly overseen by national governments. But these governments are often far out of touch with remote, rural coastal communities. Local governments can be the solution.

Giving mayors and their communities the power to design and declare locally managed MPAs can speed up the establishment of protected areas. And they can do so in a way that reflects the needs of the local communities, ensuring that they can sustain enforcement and management over time. In Honduras, mayors have helped community associations secure national funds to manage newly declared MPAs.

In June, leaders from around the world will gather in Nice, France for the United Nations Ocean Conference. While many nations will be thinking big about how to save the ocean, it is important to remember that small MPAs are one of the most powerful solutions available.