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Hope in the Coral Triangle

By: Liz Cunningham

“We need to take care of the ocean, because we have no land,” Arman said. “The sea is our home.” Those were the last words the Bajau sea nomad in Sulawesi told me before we parted.
When I researched my book Ocean Country, I asked, “Who more than any other cultural group in the world calls the ocean home?” The answer was the Austronesia sea nomads of Southeast Asia. Nowhere on earth are there a people whose lives are more deeply intertwined with the sea. While they now primarily live in stilt villages, they live in the wake of a 10,000 year old tradition of nomadic life at sea—their ancestors ate, cooked, hunted, slept, and gave birth at sea.…

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Atlantic’s First Marine National Monument!

 
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
 
FACT SHEET: President Obama to Continue Global Leadership in Combatting Climate Change and Protecting Our Ocean by Creating the First Marine National Monument in the Atlantic Ocean
 

 
Today, President Obama will designate the first marine national monument in the Atlantic Ocean, protecting fragile
deep-sea ecosystems off the coast of New England as the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument. The new national monument – which encompasses pristine underwater mountains and canyons – will provide critical protections for important ecological resources and marine species, including deep-sea coral and endangered whales and sea turtles. 
President Obama will make this announcement in remarks today at the 3rd annual Our Ocean Conference in Washington D.C.…

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Hope Spot Nominations Open to the Public!

Citizens of the Blue Planet Have Spoken: 14 New Places in the Ocean, Vetted by IUCN and Mission Blue, Will Now Serve as a Flashpoint to Ignite Global Support for Marine Protection
Over the past year, citizens and organizations across the planet have nominated marine environments especially deserving of protection – known as Hope Spots – for review by Mission Blue and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). After rigorous scientific vetting and policy analysis, Mission Blue and IUCN are proud to announce the names of 14 new Hope Spots, which came directly from a concerned global community calling out for more ocean protection. By allowing citizens to elect their own Hope Spots, Mission Blue and IUCN hope to meet the goal of igniting broad public support for a global network of marine protected areas large enough to protect and restore the ocean’s health.…

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National Parks Were America’s Best Idea. Let’s Bring Them Underwater

Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument is now the world’s largest marine protected area. We can do more.
 
By Sylvia Earle
and John Bridgeland
 
PUBLISHED AUGUST 26, 2016 on National Geographic 

One hundred years ago, President Woodrow Wilson and Congress created the National Park Service to conserve areas of natural, cultural and historic importance and leave them “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

Places like Yellowstone and Yosemite were already in federal protection, but in the next 100 years, America’s “best idea” would include 413 areas and more than 84 million acres of vast wilderness, scenic rivers, military battlefields, presidential homes and more. It was a radical idea to put large tracts of land into federal custody on the heels of the Industrial Age when almost nothing was untouched by development and our manifest destiny.…

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Hope Spots: An Actionable Plan to Save the Ocean

The immense problems facing the ocean often leave us feeling powerless. But what if there was a concrete, actionable strategy to nurse the ocean back to health? Dr. Sylvia Earle argues that there is. As a result, Mission Blue and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) are opening up nominations for ‘Hope Spots‘ – marine areas in a network targeted for enhanced protection that are critical to the health of the ocean.
Hope Spots are areas in the ocean recognized by scientists for having unique ecological attributes that make them especially deserving of designation as marine protected areas. They may have an exceptional abundance and diversity of species such as the Coral Triangle Hope Spot in the Indo-Pacific. Or perhaps they have an ecosystem essential to marine life migration such as the Sargasso Sea Hope Spot in the Atlantic Ocean.…

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Ascension: Halfway to the Atlantic’s largest marine reserve

 

 
By Charles Clover, Executive Director, Blue Marine Foundation
 
 

On the morning of Sunday 3 January 2016, the world woke to the news that the British government was proposing to create a “marine reserve nearly the size of the United Kingdom” in the tropical Atlantic around the island of Ascension. It was a moment of triumph for all those who had campaigned so hard for this outcome. The proposed designation of half the waters around Ascension Island would be the largest fully protected marine reserve in the Atlantic Ocean. Yet it is important to understand that what has happened is, for now, just a closure of some but not all of Ascension’s waters to commercial fishing and that a great deal more remains to be done by both British and the US governments if the formal protection of this marine treasure is to succeed and, crucially, to be supported by the local people.…

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5 Discoveries in Cabo Pulmo Marine Park

On our recent Hope Spot Expedition to Cabo Pulmo Marine Park, located in the Gulf of California Hope Spot, we made five discoveries:
1. The Ocean is For Everyone

Dr. Sylvia Earle and the Mission Blue team were deeply honored to spend the morning of February 27th with Eduardo Martinez, director of Fundacion Teleton. This Mexican nonprofit works with disabled people—like the three Mexican teens named Fausto, Roberto and Salma who came along to dive with Dr. Earle—their first ever dive in the ocean! Dr. Earle expressed directly to these newly coronated divers her deepest admiration for their courage. The ocean, truly, is for everyone and we have Fausto, Roberto and Salma to look at for proof. This memorable dive was made possible by David Castro, a special friend of Mission Blue and a disabled diver instructor who runs Cabo Pulmo Divers.…

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Skeletons Enmeshed in Plastic Pollution Descend on Barcelona

Mission Blue is proud to join the Plastic Pollution Coalition (PPC) in sponsoring a plastic art exhibit in Barcelona’s metro and airport. The name of the remarkable installation is Vida Tóxica (Toxic Life) and it was created by Catalan artist Alvaro Soler Arpa to present the issue of global plastic pollution to the millions of travelers who pass through Barcelona. With a total of fourteen sculptures created with bones and plastic waste, Mr. Arpa emphasizes the human impact of runaway plastic pollution on ecosystems and individual animals. Approximately eight million tons of plastic are dumped in the ocean each year, making marine plastic pollution a major issue that impacts animals across the food chain, from whales to zooplankton.
The sculptures are the result of a painstaking process.…

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A Gateway to Discovering Earth’s Underwater Amazon

Mission Blue is excited to announce our new partnership with The Coral Triangle website—a non-profit enterprise supported by the WWF that “tells the story of this million square kilometer marine bioregion in words, pictures and video.”

The global heart of coral reefs, the Coral Triangle, is located in the Pacific and touches the waters of Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste. Called “the Amazon of the seas,” this global treasure covers 5.7 million square kilometers of ocean, contains 75 percent of all known coral species and sustains the lives of approximately 120 million humans. There are over 3,000 kinds of fish in this area—more than twice the number found anywhere else in the world. Without a doubt, this is a prime global center for precious marine biological diversity.…

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A New Years Resolution for the Climate

By Courtney Mattison

The dust has settled following the momentous COP21 climate summit in Paris last month, and now the real work begins. Ministers from nearly 200 countries have voluntarily committed to scale up the global response to climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, backing sustainable development and renewable energy projects, working to eradicate poverty in areas threatened by the effects of climate change, and ratchet up those efforts over time. The 32-page COP21 Paris Agreement even recognizes the ocean—a key driver of climate and weather covering 71 percent of our planet—as an important ecosystem to protect despite the fact that the ocean was not included in the COP21 agenda. What happens next is as important as what has been agreed.…

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