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A two-day conference on marine conservation saw its participants pledging USD 1.8 billion towards the cause, even as President Barack Obama made a strong pitch to create the largest marine preserve in the world by protecting a massive stretch of the Pacific Ocean from drilling and illegal fishing. The first-ever “Our Ocean” Conference organised by the State Department resulted in commitments from government and private sources valued at more than USD 800 million to conserve the ocean and its resources for future generations, Secretary of State, John Kerry, said.

In addition, Norway announced it will allocate USD 1 billion to climate change mitigation and adaptation assistance.

The two-day event culminated yesterday with participant countries including India committing to protect more ...

0.000001 – one hundred thousandth – is a number so small that to most people it seems like nothing at all. Yet four and a half years since the Marine Act of 2009 came into force – legislation that was heralded as the saviour of UK seas – this is the sum total of UK waters that is protected from all fishing for the purpose of nature conservation.

The Marine Act is that rare thing: a law supported by all political parties. The sea is dear to so many of us it transcends ideology. In the run up to the law’s enactment, there was widespread recognition that the seas were in trouble. Fisheries were in decline, once rich habitats had been stripped by two centuries of destructive fishing, and formerly abundant species had been brought to the verge of disappearance...

As the world’s largest archipelago, Indonesia is blessed with at least 5.1 million hectares of coral reefs. However, almost 65 percent of the reefs are now considered threatened from overfishing. Almost half are considered threatened specifically from destructive fishing practices.

Nadjib Prasyad runs the Fisheries Office in Wakatobi, South-east Sulawesi, and he laments the various activities that destroy the reefs and consequently threaten the livelihood of the villages: fish bombing, sand extraction, collection of the reefs themselves. Prasyad says that, once the reefs die, so do the fish: “We have nothing except our coral reefs.So we have to really protect them since they’re the only source of our region’s development.”

Reviving and conserving coral reefs

The Indonesian govern...

The fish that live off the Malay Archipelago, between Southeast Asia and Australia, are among the most diverse in the world. Now researchers are reporting that the area owes its diversity to the stability of coral reefs over the past three million years. The reefs provided fish a safe home and the means to diversify and evolve into new species, said Peter F. Cowman, an evolutionary biologist at Yale and an author of the new research, which appears in the journal Science.

“It really drives home the fact that the past shapes the present,” he said.

Using information from underwater sediment, the scientists were able to estimate changes in surface temperatures over time. From that information, they inferred where coral reefs were and how stable they were over time...

Hunting of sharks has continued in the waters off Surigao City and Surigao del Norte and even in neighboring areas despite calls by conservation groups to stop such practice. Lured by offers of high price for shark fins, some local fishermen in Barangay Punta Bilar in Surigao City go out to the high sea to hunt these marine predators.

“We’ll get nothing but only sharks,” Jun (not his real name) told MindaNews on Tuesday.

“We start to fish at night until the wee hours of the morning,” he said in the vernacular, adding their hunting party would usually consist of at least four people.

On Tuesday, Jun and his group caught two sharks, one about 40 kilos and the other about 25 kilos. A third one got off the hook.

“Sayang we could have a good catch today,” Jun said.

“We would reac...

Six countries of the World’s Coral Reef Triangle, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and East Timor, are agreed to encourage the involvement of women in protecting and conserving the world’s marine natural resources.

This was declared in the Women Leaders Forum held in Grand Kawanua Center (GKICC), in Manado, on May 13.

The Secretary-General of The Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries, Sjarief Widjaja, who acts as the Chairman of Interim Regional Secretariat (IRS) of CTI-CFF, stated that women are necessary to take part in the marine conservation initiatives, particularly in the marine and coastal resource conservation, post-capture fish handling, and the trade.

Sjarief continued that the Forum has set a number of year-round activities, incl...

Indonesia is preparing a regulation in an effort to improve sustainable coral reef management given the upcoming World Coral Reef Conference (WCRC) in Manado, North Sulawesi, between May 14-17, 2014, a minister said.

“For the substance of the conference, Indonesia as the host country is preparing a regulation for sustainable global coral reef management,” Marine and Fisheries Minister Sharif Cicip Sutardjo said here on Saturday.

The minister noted that the regulation is being prepared because of concern about the condition of the increasingly degraded world coral reefs.

According to him, coral reefs in Indonesia are the best in the world and, therefore, they should be protected with a regulation.

“The sustainability of coral reefs in Indonesia should be protected with an unequivoca...

From February to April this year, I joined Dr. Tse-Lynn Loh, a postdoctoral research associate at Shedd Aquarium, as a field assistant in Vietnam – a major exporter of seahorses – to study seahorse populations here and ensure they are managed sustainably. Dr. Loh and her partners at Project Seahorse are collaborating with my institute, the Research Institute of Marine Fisheries (RIMF) in Haiphong, Vietnam, to advance seahorse conservation in Southeast Asia, a region of the world that exhibits significant marine biodiversity but is also susceptible to increased development and commercialization.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been investigating seahorse distribution and habitat associations, as well as raising awareness about a global citizen science program that supports seahorse conse...