Comment

Marine ecosystems face threats from human-induced stressors like climate change, pollution, and habitat loss. Despite international endeavors, significant gaps remain in understanding ocean dynamics. This article presents six policy recommendations to integrate plankton populations into conservation frameworks. These could be leveraged in the process approved at CBD’s COP16 in Colombia to update criteria for defining ecologically or biologically significant marine areas (EBSAs) and supporting science-based Marine Protected Area (MPA) designations.

The rapidly expanding offshore wind energy industry presents an unprecedented opportunity to collect valuable data on protected marine species, particularly the endangered North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis), through required Protected Species Observer (PSO) programs. PSO data, gathered during industry activities by trained biologists in often remote and challenging offshore environments, can fill critical knowledge gaps regarding species distribution, occurrence, and interactions with development, informing conservation and management strategies. While challenges remain regarding data accessibility, standardization, and integration, ongoing initiatives by agencies like the US National Marine Fisheries Service and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management coupled with existing data-sharing efforts and open-source platforms, offer pathways to maximize the value of PSO data. Realizing this potential requires collaborative partnerships between industry, agencies, researchers, and other stakeholders to establish centralized, publicly accessible databases with standardized protocols and adequate funding for data management. Successfully leveraging PSO data will significantly enhance our understanding of marine species and contribute to their conservation in the face of increasing offshore development.

The Ocean is central to our lives, providing vital ecosystem goods and services. It generates 50% of the Earth’s oxygen; absorbs around 30% of anthropogenic carbon emissions; regulates the Earth’s climate; and provides food, income, and livelihoods for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. However, the Ocean is under serious multiple threats from overexploitation, climate change, and pollution. Here, I state my dream 2050 scenario for the Ocean and describe how trade, in the midst of broader ocean governance efforts, can contribute to realizing this dream.

Lessons learned from Thailand’s largest youth-led marine restoration initiative highlight how to enable future environmental stewardship efforts. Local and hands-on approaches can help drive effective climate solutions. Immersive and educational conservation experiences can empower local communities, foster collective awareness, and build individual accountability to restore degrading ecosystems. This multidimensional land-to-sea approach can serve as a guidebook for other youth to spearhead multi-habitat restoration and conservation efforts worldwide.

As climate change and biodiversity loss intensify, the deep seabed beckons as a source of metals for batteries. Initiating this new exploitation conflicts with international agreements to decelerate biodiversity loss through wider protections of ecosystem integrity. The poor record of terrestrial mining must not be an excuse to mine the ocean floor. Improved oversight and biodiversity protection as miners increase production on land will produce a better global biodiversity outcome.

2025 will be a decisive year for the deep sea mining regime. Pressure is mounting on the International Seabed Authority to adopt regulations for the commercial extraction of minerals while an increasing group of diverse actors are calling for a moratorium. In this comment, we give an overview of the state of negotiations, contextualize the most contentious issues and explain the institutional and legal framework in which the negotiations are taking place.

Shellfish reef ecosystems in Australia have been greatly depleted. Building on earlier trials, a continent-scale restoration initiative was underway by 2019 to restore 30% of their former distribution. Integral elements of building and progressing this ecoscape-scale restoration program are outlined and challenges discussed. Documenting pathways and challenges to large-scale restoration informs global commitments to see 30% of degraded ecosystems under effective restoration by 2030.

The Dubai Ocean Declaration is the latest international call to expand ocean observation worldwide. We argue that there needs to be a committed effort to establish governance systems to guide data collection designed around equity, to ensure ocean data collection contributes to sustainable development. Ocean science has historically been led by the Global North, neglecting the priorities and leadership of the Global South, and limiting the relevance of ocean science for global sustainability.

Urbanizing river deltas are highly susceptible to sea level rise and extreme weather events such as floods and droughts. Water-related disasters are already happening more often due to climate change, rapid urbanization, unsustainable land use and aging infrastructure threatening a large fraction of human and natural environments in these low lying and sinking areas around the globe. As stress levels of climate change are accelerating, societal and physical transformations are essential for adapting our deltas to climate change. In the Netherlands, imagination and evidence by design in the form of a long-term spatial vision, played a pivotal role in the past century to set, share and accomplish a new direction to overcome flood disasters by altering the coastlines and riverbeds of the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta. The unprecedented rainfall in July 2021 and the storm in December 2021 which hit Western Europe revealed the effectiveness of this new direction. We therefore plea for a prominent role of design in climate science and delta management to imagine, analyse and communicate future perspectives for climate adaptation in urbanizing deltas.

Interdisciplinary marine research is pivotal for addressing ocean sustainability challenges but may exclude diverse socio-economic, cultural, or identity groups. Drawing on perspectives of marine Early Career Researchers, we highlight the importance of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in advancing interdisciplinary marine science and present ten recommendations to enhance DEI. As our ocean faces increasing threats, fostering DEI within this domain is not merely an aspirational goal but an ethical imperative.

Australia is reforming its ineffective Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, which currently allows the export of four threatened species listed under the Act along with additional species recognized as globally threatened. We propose three recommendations for the new legislation: (1) apply the same precautions to commercially harvested species as other threatened species; (2) mandate annual reviews of threatened species status; and (3) assess species listed on global conservation conventions.

Buckley and Cooper’s¹ estimates of surfing’s economic contributions via enhanced mental health were extrapolated from national park visitation. We extend their argument by distinguishing benefits from green and blue spaces, and the particularities of surfing, both as therapy and recreation. Personal Wellbeing Index scores reveal improved outcomes among Australian surfers, compared to the national population. These diverse well-being effects highlight the value of surfing as an ocean-based ecosystem service.

The deep ocean is increasingly featured in climate solution discussions. An emerging narrative suggests that marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) is essential to meet global climate targets. The argument made is similar to claims that deep-seabed mining (DSM) is necessary to enable widespread electrification, in that both are framed as helping to address climate change. We compare the structure and history of these narratives, highlighting that while potential negative impacts on marine life have emerged as a central feature in debates about DSM, environmental and social risks associated with mCDR are yet to receive similar recognition. In light of this comparison, we argue that potential harm needs to be further emphasized in considerations of deploying mCDR.

With ecosystem services (ES) vital for human wellbeing¹, the protection of nature is a human rights matter. We outline how recent advances in international human rights law should inform a revamp of how precaution is applied within environmental decision-making. Critically, precautionary decision-making must evolve to make use of best-available evidence, including novel ES research approaches, to assess ‘foreseeable’ harms to all aspects of human wellbeing that are protected as human rights.

A new international agreement on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ) was adopted and subsequently opened for signature in September 2023. Yet on average, recent multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) have taken over four years to move from signature to entry into force, while ocean-focused MEAs have taken nearly twice as long. Rapid ratification of the BBNJ Agreement is crucial for multiple reasons, not least to achieve the Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Framework target for 30% of the marine environment to be protected by 2030. It is also vital to fulfill the Agreement’s stated ambition to contribute to a just and equitable future for humankind, considering today’s unprecedented expansion of commercial activities into the ocean.

Restoration supports the recovery of ecological attributes such as cover, complexity, and diversity to slow the areal decline of natural ecosystems. Restoration activity is intensifying worldwide to combat persistent stressors that are driving global declines to the extent and resilience of coral reefs. However, restoration is disputed as a meaningful aid to reef ecological recovery, often as an expensive distraction to addressing the root causes of reef loss. We contend this dispute partly stems from inferences drawn from small-scale experimental restoration outcomes amplified by misconceptions around cost-based reasoning. Alongside aggressive emissions reductions, we advocate urgent investment in coral reef ecosystem restoration as part of the management toolbox to combat the destruction of reefs as we know them within decades.

As marine conservation challenges intensify with accelerating anthropogenic change, informing public deliberation about difficult trade-offs requires commitment to epistemological pluralism. Robust integration of social sciences can improve the realism of policy debates by explicating a range of potential social-ecological outcomes. Funders have long incentivized interdisciplinarity, yet progress is insufficient and embedded in a political economy of knowledge production. Failure to substantively address inequities can stymie collaboration. Institutional expectations for promotion and tenure rarely recognize the extent to which deep engagement transforms epistemological norms and scholarly outputs. Several organizations and programs offer relevant experience and resources. Senior scholars can use their privilege to broaden the public accountability of science.

Recent calls for an International Panel for Ocean Sustainability (IPOS) to provide consensus-based science advice for global ocean sustainability appeal to the successes of global science–policy platforms, specifically the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Intergovernmental Science–Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), and the World Ocean Assessment (WOA)¹. A new IPOS may facilitate global ocean sustainability, but only if it proactively addresses the challenges facing existing international science–policy platforms—namely representation, accountability, and politicization.

Conservation of nearshore marine ecosystems gains political support from the economic value of cultural ecosystem services from surfing. This contribution is greater if the mental health benefits of surfing are included. For the Gold Coast, Australia, these are estimated at ~US$1.0–3.3 billion per year. Mental health benefits from surfing comprise 57–74% of the total economic benefits of surfing; 4.4–13.5 times direct expenditure by surfers; and 4–12 times economic effects via property and inbound tourism. For the 50 million surfers worldwide, these translate to a global estimated value of ~US$0.38–1.30 trillion per year. Greater accuracy will require multi-year panel studies.