This story was originally published by Centro de Periodismo Investigativo. Read in Spanish here.

Across from Old San Juan’s piers, taxi driver Carlos Vera Centeno waits for tourists who booked him in advance to disembark so he can take them on a tour or to a nearby beach. He has followed that routine for 18 years, but the time it takes him to pick up or drop off passengers at the port has doubled and, at times, tripled.

“This year, I had to raise [the price of] my services for cruise passengers because a trip that used to take me 20 or 25 minutes [now] can take me an hour just to drop [passengers] off because of the traffic,” Vera Centeno said.

Traffic congestion is only one consequence of the overcrowding in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico’s main cruise port. The crush of visitors is also putting pressure on the historic city’s infrastructure and fueling frustration among residents.

Without a coordinated plan to address basic-service infrastructure, manage traffic into and out of the San Juan Islet, or ease the strain these conditions place on residents of the Walled City, the Puerto Rico government continues to promote the cruise industry as an economic activity that should keep growing, residents and business owners interviewed by the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI) said.

In August 2025, Gov. Jenniffer González Colón declared that “we want more” as Puerto Rico sought to become a homeport for additional cruise lines. Less than a year later, water tanker trucks can be seen parked along Old San Juan’s narrow cobblestone streets, supplying water to businesses and residents.

The tanker trucks provide temporary relief from low water pressure and service outages that affect other parts of the capital but occur more frequently on the San Juan Islet, according to residents. Vanessa Droz Martínez, a San Sebastián Street resident and member of the Asociación de Vecinos del Viejo San Juan, known as AVISAJ, said water pressure drops, particularly at higher elevations, when cruise ships are supplied with water. The Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority (PRASA) told the CPI that supplying docked cruise ships does not adversely affect water service for Old San Juan residents.

Overcrowding has consequences beyond traffic congestion and declining water pressure. The CPI’s investigation found that the poorly regulated, government-subsidized industry is also straining Old San Juan’s inadequate sanitation infrastructure and fragile streets, contributing to disorder and generating noise and air pollution.

Disconnected from residents

As on other Caribbean islands, one limitation associated with cruise tourism is that the economic activity it generates is concentrated largely around port areas. As a result, it does not translate into significant revenue for other parts of Puerto Rico, or even other areas of San Juan, while placing tremendous pressure on the host community because the influx of people exceeds the historic city’s capacity, sources interviewed by the CPI agreed.

“The Asociación de Vecinos del Viejo San Juan views with deep concern the governor’s recent announcements concerning port expansion and the intention to turn Puerto Rico into a cruise hub similar to Miami,” the association said in a written statement to the CPI. “We believe these proposals reflect an economic vision disconnected from the physical, historical, environmental and community realities of Old San Juan.”

“Old San Juan is a living, historic and extremely fragile city,” the association added.

San Juan is the main entry point for cruise passengers in Puerto Rico. Ponce, on the southern coast, also receives cruise ships, although activity there is limited. The Puerto Rico Tourism Company announced that in 2027, Legend of the Seas, the world’s largest cruise ship, will make a stop at the Port of Ponce. The government also wants to encourage cruise arrivals in Mayagüez, on Puerto Rico’s western coast, and has expressed interest in developing port infrastructure in Toa Baja and Cataño as part of its plan to make Puerto Rico a regional cruise hub.

AVISAJ said residents feel a tourism model has been imposed on them without opportunities for public participation, public hearings or rigorous studies assessing whether the islet can withstand the scale of activity generated by cruise ship arrivals.

Joel Pizá Batiz, former director of San Juan’s Department of Economic Development and Tourism, acknowledged that the Municipality of San Juan has no study measuring the cruise industry’s economic impact on the historic district. Pizá Batiz resigned from his position in July.

According to the Puerto Rico Tourism Company, 1.6 million people visited Puerto Rico by cruise ship in 2025. Two million are projected to arrive in 2026, according to Clarivette Díaz Sosa, general manager of San Juan Cruise Port, the company that operates six cruise piers in San Juan under a public-private partnership, or P3.

Compared with the rest of the Caribbean, Puerto Rico ranked fifth among the destinations that received the most visitors in 2024, according to the cruise industry’s most recent study by the Florida-Caribbean Cruise Association, or FCCA. It trailed Cozumel and Costa Maya in Mexico, as well as the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas.

Gerardo González Núñez, an economist and director of the graduate program at Inter American University of Puerto Rico’s School of Business, said the cruise industry is predominantly a Caribbean phenomenon. The Caribbean is the world’s most visited cruise destination, according to the 2025 CLIA Global Market Report. That year, the region received 44% of all cruise passengers, about 16 million passengers. European destinations ranked second, with 9 million passengers.

Still, “in terms of volume, the number of cruise passengers Puerto Rico receives is marginal compared with the number of tourists who arrive [by air],” González Núñez said. According to Tourism Company data, nearly 7.3 million tourists traveled to Puerto Rico by air in 2025, compared with 1.6 million who arrived by cruise ship.

Cruise passengers in Puerto Rico spent $367 million in 2024, according to a study by Discover Puerto Rico, the organization responsible for marketing Puerto Rico as a tourism destination. Discover Puerto Rico said those figures could be attributed to Old San Juan because most cruise ships visiting Puerto Rico dock there.

But the Puerto Rico Planning Board estimated in its most recent economic report that cruise passengers spent $228 million in Puerto Rico in 2024 — $139 million less than Discover Puerto Rico’s estimate. Discover Puerto Rico said its estimate was higher because it included members of the military in the excursionist category and used “a different model to analyze the data.”

The Planning Board’s analysis was also based on fiscal years, while Discover Puerto Rico uses calendar years.

Revenue left on the table

One of the Puerto Rico government’s tools for making the island a homeport for cruise lines, extending ships’ stays and increasing passenger volume is the use of economic incentives.

The Puerto Rico Incentives Code includes a portfolio of 12 incentives available to cruise lines and port agents. Port agents are companies that provide administrative and logistical services to cruise ships before, during and after they dock in Puerto Rico. The incentives include fee discounts and bonuses for using Puerto Rico as a homeport, incentives for vessels that remain in port for more than eight hours, and partial reimbursements for purchases of supplies, maintenance services and products.

“The main incentive cruise ships receive is not a tax incentive, but an economic incentive that operates as a discount on the per-passenger fee and depends on the volume of passengers arriving in Puerto Rico,” the Department of Economic Development and Commerce said.

The incentives are not discretionary. The Tourism Company must grant them to any company or cruise ship operator that applies and meets the requirements established under Act 60-2019.

The Tourism Company estimated that from 2023 through 2025 it awarded at least $30.8 million in economic incentives to cruise lines Carnival Cruises, Norwegian Cruise Lines and Royal Caribbean, as well as the port-agent companies Pérez & CIA and Continental Shipping.

The incentives are paid as reimbursements once “compliance with the requirements established by law is documented and validated,” Tourism Company press officer Reimarie Carrero said.

Pizá Batiz, who also headed the Puerto Rico Ports Authority during the previous four-year administration, said the incentives are intended to increase the number of passengers arriving in Puerto Rico.

“They’re going to put their ship in the destinations that generate the most money for them,” he said. “So, we, as destinations, are under pressure to figure out how to make ourselves more attractive and how to make the destination generate more money for the [cruise] line.”

The FCCA, whose members include executives from cruise lines and related industries, has actively lobbied for economic incentives before the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico, the entity imposed by the U.S. Congress on Puerto Rico in 2016 to oversee the territory’s fiscal management and budget.

The Department of Economic Development and Commerce told the CPI that it measures the effectiveness of incentives through studies and return-on-investment analyses. But in its most recent report of this kind, published in 2024 using 2020 data, the cruise industry is mentioned only once, and the report offers no analysis of these economic incentives.

Decline in gross revenue

In 2023, the Puerto Rico government received nearly $21 million in revenue from fees and charges related to cruise traffic at piers then operated by the Puerto Rico Ports Authority.

Between February and March 2024, those operations were transferred from the Ports Authority to San Juan Cruise Port under a contract signed in 2022. The P3 agreement, finalized during the administration of Gov. Pedro Pierluisi for a 30-year term, initially provides the Ports Authority with 5% of operating revenue. That share will gradually increase to 9% over the first decade of the contract, according to financial analysis firm S&P Global.

In 2024, the Ports Authority collected $4.7 million during the months it still operated the cruise piers, plus another $967,571 representing its contractual 5% share under the P3 agreement, according to data provided by the public corporation. In 2025, the Ports Authority received $1,435,507 from the total revenue collected by SJCP. The CPI requested SJCP’s total revenue figures, but they had not been provided by publication time.

SJCP is a subsidiary of Global Ports Holdings, which operates other cruise ports in the Caribbean, including in St. Lucia, the Bahamas and Antigua. In Puerto Rico, SJCP is responsible for “establishing, charging, retaining and enforcing payment of all cruise port-related revenues,” according to a document from its parent company.

The Ports Authority said the Puerto Rico government’s benefit from its agreement with San Juan Cruise Port is not limited to its share of operating revenue.

“Under the contract, SJCP assumed responsibility for developing and implementing, at its own expense, a comprehensive design, maintenance and construction program aimed at keeping the cruise port facilities safe, efficient and suitable for the industry’s needs,” the Ports Authority said.

“In addition, SJCP must carry out repairs and improvements at several piers using its own resources, including work necessary to address structural deficiencies identified at the facilities,” it added.

On April 29 of this year, the Ports Authority transferred $98.2 million in federal funds to SJCP for repairs to the cruise port facilities, according to records from the Office of the Comptroller of Puerto Rico. The company says the rehabilitation project will cost $425 million and includes development of the port areas, which are divided into two districts: Old San Juan, where piers 1, 3 and 4 will be used for transit calls and luxury cruises; and the homeport district, which includes the Pan American piers and piers 11 and 13.

Reinvestment in the economy?

Tourists arriving on cruise ships generate about half of merchants’ annual revenue, estimated Eddie Pérez Morales, director of the Corporación para el Desarrollo Empresarial y Cultural de la Isleta de San Juan (CODEVISA).

“Without the economic impact provided by cruise ships,” Pérez said, “merchants would be under a little more pressure.”

Businesses in Old San Juan, like other small and midsize businesses across Puerto Rico, contend with high electricity costs, inflation and difficulty retaining employees. Old San Juan businesses face the additional challenges of operating in a city built during the Spanish colonial period.

The economic benefits generated by cruise passengers flow primarily to businesses closest to the piers or major tourist attractions, the CODEVISA director said. In his experience in the industry, tourists spend most heavily on souvenirs and local food.

As a result, neighborhood grocery stores, pharmacies and medical offices that residents need have been replaced in Old San Juan by bars, restaurants and souvenir shops, said Yoamadil Cabán González, a Sol Street resident. Those shops do not necessarily sell goods made by Puerto Rican artisans because generic souvenirs imported from China have proliferated, she said. Many residents have also moved away, and even the neighborhood’s only medical office has closed.

“[Old San Juan] is being transformed from the living, historic residential city [it once was] into a floating theme park that benefits only large corporations while weakening our health, our infrastructure, our biodiversity and, above all, our sense of community,” Cabán González told the CPI.

“Cruise ships are not bringing a sustainable or respectful economy,” she said. “They are putting pressure on our infrastructure and driving out the businesses that residents actually need.”

Because cruise passengers have meals and drinks included on board, their economic impact “is superficial and low-value,” Cabán González said.

Discover Puerto Rico spokesperson Karen Garnik said the organization’s perception studies show that tourists view Old San Juan’s residential and historic character positively.

“If you remove the residents, the rhythm fades. If you replace the traditional restaurant with a chain store, the flavor becomes generic. If you displace the artisan from Cristo Street, the architecture becomes a backdrop. We have seen this story play out in Venice [in Italy] and Dubrovnik [in Croatia]. We’re not interested in the sequel,” Garnik said.

She added that decisions concerning port management, excursion contracts, businesses at the piers and ship arrivals “fall under the Puerto Rico Tourism Company and the Puerto Rico Ports Authority.”

Among residents’ many concerns is the construction, with support from the Tourism Company, of a Hard Rock-branded hotel across from the Port of San Juan. The project would require raising the site’s ground level and has a design that does not conform to Old San Juan’s architecture.

Impact on infrastructure

“When those people disembark, that’s thousands of people coming into San Juan. There are no public restrooms here,” said Lourdes Suárez Valle, a Sol Street resident. “They walk around and buy one thing or another. But they’re not a particularly appealing clientele for businesses or for us.”

The former director of San Juan’s Department of Economic Development and Tourism said the municipality places portable toilets in the area on days when large numbers of cruise ships are in port. It plans to build 10 public restroom facilities at the former Old San Juan Tourism Office behind the Tapia Theater. According to the municipality’s 2025-2026 budget, the work would cost an estimated $230,000.

In October 2025, two months after the governor called for more cruise traffic while announcing the FCCA convention in Puerto Rico, Old San Juan residents and merchants accused PRASA of supplying cruise ships with water while they had gone without service for days.

PRASA told the CPI that cruise ships do not receive priority over other commercial and residential customers and said that during periods of low pressure or service interruptions, cruise ships are affected like any other customer.

“The Authority states that there are no records or evidence linking the presence of cruise ships at Old San Juan’s ports to adverse effects on the drinking water supply [for residents or businesses in the area],” PRASA press officer Gian Paul Luciano Ramos said.

But Luna Street resident Nitayno González Otero does not believe that.

González Otero said water pressure in homes in the historic district drops as the number of cruise ships increases. These fluctuations typically occur in the afternoon and last about two hours.

“The elevation where you live makes a difference. For example, I’m on Luna Street, and I’m on the first floor, and you can feel the difference in pressure. You can see just a trickle of water coming out. But people who live on the second or third floor, or on higher streets, are affected even more because the pressure simply doesn’t reach them,” he said.

PRASA supplied more than 105,000 cubic meters of water to cruise ships at the Port of San Juan from January 2019 through March 2024, according to Ports Authority data. That amount is equivalent to one month of water use for just over 6,000 households, which consume an average of 17 cubic meters per month, according to PRASA.

Tourists and residents compete for space

Víctor R. Castro Gómez, a Luna Street resident, said tourists and residents compete for the same pedestrian and roadway infrastructure.

“The first thing you see when those ships arrive is people competing for space, practically battling with vehicles,” he said.

Old San Juan has about 20 streets.

The frenzy snarls traffic, particularly for residents and merchants, forcing them to adjust when they enter and leave the historic district.

It is also not unusual for Old San Juan’s cobblestones to become damaged or for streets to sink under the weight of vehicles and pedestrians. Many of these streets were built over vaulted structures and paved with blue cobblestones, some installed in the late 19th century and others added later as replacements.

Pizá Batiz said the municipality has a pedestrian plan for the historic district that is activated on certain streets only during special events, generally once a month. He added that turning Old San Juan into a pedestrian city would have to be accompanied by a more robust public transit system.

He also acknowledged that the municipality has no tourism carrying-capacity study to determine how many people can be in Old San Juan at the same time without jeopardizing its historic infrastructure and essential services for residents and businesses.

San Juan’s Office of Emergency Management has established a maximum capacity of 33,000 people in the city, but that threshold is intended to prevent emergencies or facilitate crowd management during large-scale events.

Andy Rivera Rivera, founder of the Sociedad Puertorriqueña de Dibujos de Edificios Históricos, explained that during the first years after the U.S. invasion in 1898, water channels were designed beneath the streets of the Walled City as a key part of its aqueduct system. To date, 32 tunnels, 48 crypts and 1,232 cisterns are known to exist in Old San Juan. Although they are no longer in use, Rivera Rivera warned that this complex network of tunnels, crypts and cisterns makes the city’s streets vulnerable to excessive vehicle loads.

Lack of will from authorities

As Old San Juan residents tried to sleep one night in April 2024, a cruise ship was blasting music, its lights were on and its smokestacks were emitting a strong odor and soot. The light, noise and air pollution from the massive vessel made it impossible to fall asleep.

Residents called the Puerto Rico Police Bureau but were told the agency did not have jurisdiction to intervene. Police Bureau spokesperson Axel Valencia declined to address the residents’ allegations and said in a written response to the CPI that the Municipal Police is responsible for security in the community and the San Juan Bay area.

Contrary to Valencia’s statement, Puerto Rico Ports Authority regulations establish that the Puerto Rico Police Bureau must patrol port facilities alongside Ports Authority security officers to prevent crimes and other legal violations. Under the regulations, Ports Authority officers must cooperate with police investigations into alleged legal violations at port facilities and in the San Juan Bay area.

More than 100 Old San Juan residents signed a petition calling on the Tourism Company, the Ports Authority and the Municipality of San Juan to address their complaints.

“The increase in the number and size of cruise ships means more noise, light pollution and environmental pollution that negatively affect residents’ health, emotional well-being and peaceful coexistence in a city where people actually live,” said the letter sent by AVISAJ. “The mismanagement of cruise ships threatens our ability to live in health and harmony.”

Lilliam Cruz Viñas, a Sol Street resident, said the community also lacks enough law enforcement officers. Residents who call to file complaints find that there are not enough municipal officers or patrol cars, even though “fights have broken out” among tourists late at night, along with other violations of the Public Order Code.

“The police are absent,” she said. “I almost never call the police because it doesn’t really affect me, but it does affect my neighbors. So, what happens? They call the station, and the police say they don’t have patrol cars, that they don’t have motorcycles — if they answer at all, because they don’t always answer.”

Pizá Batiz said 85 Municipal Police officers are assigned to Old San Juan. Municipal data show that the officers have 18 motorcycles and eight patrol vehicles.

“The cruise industry stirs up a lot of passions, both among those who support it and those who oppose it,” he said. “Situations are going to arise, and they have to be mediated, always starting from the premise that this is an important [economic] segment and that we are competing with other jurisdictions.”

“We have to address these issues knowing that we cannot fall behind commercially,” he added.

The former official said he met periodically with residents and business owners in the area. He was unfamiliar with whether the Public Order Code applies to cruise ships.

Reinaldo Segurola Pérez, a Sol Street resident, documented on Facebook the incidents Old San Juan residents experienced almost daily and said he then forwarded them to the Municipality of San Juan. Even so, he said, communication with Mayor Miguel Romero was scarce and limited.

“Old San Juan is the place where anything goes,” Segurola said. “It’s one thing for Old San Juan to be an excellent tourist destination and another for it to be an excellent place to live.”

“Those are two different visions, and I’m not saying we have to choose one or the other,” he added. “But we have to find a way to reconcile those interests, which are sometimes in conflict with one another, so the residential community can be sustained.”

Segurola told the CPI that the failure to address residents’ concerns pushed him to move out of Old San Juan in late December. Old San Juan’s urban core lost 32% of its population between 2010 and 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Its population fell from 3,570 residents in 2010 to 2,417 in 2020. Across the entire San Juan Islet, the population declined 10%.

This investigation was made possible in part with support from the Metcalf Ocean Nexus Academy program, created by Ocean Nexus and the Metcalf Institute in collaboration with The Uproot Project.

This translation was generated with the assistance of AI and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and clarity.

Imagine being a fisherman in the village of Ine, a scenic coastal village in the Kyoto Prefecture famous for its traditional funaya boathouses. You wake up early in the morning to start your daily catch. But as you pull your fixed coastal nets from the waters, you see something that would have felt like a winning lottery just a few years ago: a bounty of Pacific bluefin tuna filling your net.

First, you feel excitement. But then, you remember that under Japan’s strict national quota system, if you kept your haul, you would instantly blow through your entire season’s catch limit before summer even peaked. That means you would have zero quota left for the late autumn and winter months, when the Pacific bluefin tuna grow fattier, tastier, and fetch top-tier prices at market.

So you do the unthinkable: open the nets and release possibly millions of yen worth of prized fish back into the ocean. But as the giant tuna surged out, they took with them the mackerel, squid, and other fish you were legally allowed to keep.

This is the reality for most fishermen in Japan. “Not being able to keep all the fish you could potentially have caught is just part of effective fisheries management,” Andre Boustany, principal investigator of global ocean conservation at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, told The Confluence .

“The core of fisheries management is putting limits on catch,” he added. “ In the past, there were no limits on catches of Pacific bluefin tuna, which led to the stock being in horrible shape.”

But the Pacific bluefin tuna have staged a remarkable comeback in recent years, surging from a low of roughly 2 percent of unfished levels around 2010 to over 23 percent by 2022. Many largely attribute the sudden recovery to strict international protection and conservation measures, but some experts believe climate change-fueled shifts in migratory patterns play a role.

Pacific bluefin tuna are highly migratory species. And much like other fish and marine animals, they are likely shifting migration patterns due to warmer ocean water. A 2022 study by Rutgers University researchers found that large species and commercially important fisheries will shift out of their historical ranges and will likely be less abundant in their new geographic ranges as the climate warms.

“What that suggests from a fisheries perspective is that while the species we fish today will be there tomorrow, they will not be there in the same abundance … overfishing becomes easier because the population growth rates are low,” Malin Pinsky, an ecologist and co-author of the study, said in a statement at the time.

“Warming coupled with food-web dynamics will be like putting marine biodiversity in a blender,” Pinsky added.

With the Pacific bluefin tuna’s spawning numbers reaching more than 23 percent, crossing the sustainable yield threshold a decade ahead of the initial 2034 target, the international bodies governing North Pacific fisheries are looking to reward countries with cautious quota increases while also ensuring strict long-term guardrails stay in place to prevent another collapse.

That balance was central to discussions when international delegates met in Nagasaki this July. Japan, the world’s largest consumer of bluefin tuna, has repeatedly submitted formal proposals requesting an increase to commercial quotas. The country argued that Japanese fishermen face a dilemma of releasing bluefin tuna that would frequently flood into coastal set-nets intended for other species, often causing other target fish to escape or damaging gear, resulting in major financial losses.

But because decision-making among the key regional fisheries management organizations — Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) and the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC) — require a unanimous consensus, negotiations to adopt a harvest strategy reached a stalemate. Several nations pushed for a larger share of the total catch, while others resisted, arguing that rapid quota increases could derail the fishery’s long-term 20-year recovery plan.

Still, the final agreements were shadowed by significant ecological uncertainties surrounding the climate crisis. Scientists warn that warming waters and shifting ocean currents could destabilize future recovery by disrupting delicate spawning cycles, juvenile survival rates, and historical migration routes across the Pacific.

As climate change drives fish populations into new territories, Boustany said it is also forcing a overhaul of traditional diplomatic rules. Because historical quotas reflect where fish used to live, host nations now find themselves surrounded by abundant stocks they are not allowed to harvest, prompting calls to renegotiate catch allocations based on where the fish are actually located today.

“In the case of Pacific bluefin, due to stock recovery, there are more bluefin in everyone’s waters,” Boustany said. “So the ask to change the country allocations is not due to climate change per se, but rather driven by countries wanting more quota for their fisheries.”

Boustany also attributes the bluefin's remarkably rapid rebound primarily to strict international management, paired with the species' fast-recovering biology and a recent string of warm, highly productive spawning years. While conservative scientific modeling initially set low expectations, recent warmer waters may have boosted young fish survival rates, he said. However, like many experts, he cautioned against relying on warm ocean water for future growth, noting that climate change represents unpredictable wild cards for migration and ocean ecosystem overall.

“Climate change-induced shifts in migration patterns of Pacific bluefin are less well studied than in other species, but it is safe to say that climate change is impacting distributions and many other life history traits of pretty much all fish species,” Boustany said. “I think the main point to make with the recovery to date is that these fish can recover solidly if given a chance.”

Figure of the week: 92

The percentage of tested deep-sea animals containing microplastics, affecting 11 of 12 specimens researchers sampled across four species of mussels and snails. | Source: Mongabay

A castaway read 🏝️

By Natasha Vizcarra

On the morning of July 11, 2023, marine wildlife veterinarian Dr. Joe Gaydos stood in front of a beautiful, six-foot-long fish that had washed up on Crescent Beach, Orcas Island. Its body was torpedo-shaped, and its skin was gun-metal gray with an iridescent sheen. Gawkers thought it looked like a tuna of some sort. In fact, someone had already carved a huge fillet out of it.

But it wasn’t in the book Gaydos brought with him, “A Field Guide to Fishes of the Salish Sea,” a newly published guide to the inland sea around Puget Sound, the San Juan Islands, and the waters off Vancouver, British Columbia. “When I saw that it was not in the book, I knew that it was something big,” Gaydos said in a podcast three months later.

The fish, later identified as a Pacific bluefin tuna, had never been documented in the Salish Sea until that morning. As an oceanic pelagic fish, meaning a migratory fish of the open ocean, bluefin tuna has an impressive range that spans the sea around Japan to the waters off California and Mexico. It’s just not the kind of fish that would seek narrow, inland waters like the Salish Sea.

Read the full story here at University of Hawai’i’s Sea Grant page.

Two weeks of negotiations at the International Seabed Authority in Kingston, Jamaica, concluded with no new rules for deep-sea mining. Instead, the talks ended with an even stronger case for a moratorium.

The council meeting — hosted by the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN body responsible for regulating all resource and mining-related activities happening within international waters — highlighted significant gaps in the science and data needed to create reliable environmental standards for seabed mining.

ISA’s mission is guided by the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which defines the deep seabed as the “common heritage of humankind.” This means these areas of the high seas belong to no single nation and must be managed for the collective benefit of everyone.

Although countries and mining companies are already exploring the ocean floor to map out where critical minerals are most abundant, no commercial mining is currently happening. That’s because the ISA and member states are trying to finalize what’s called the “mining code,” which is essentially exploitation regulations that the ISA is actively negotiating on to govern commercial-scale deep-sea mining. The regulatory framework must include key standards and guidelines, environmental thresholds, benefit-sharing regulations, and other governance measures.

While the ISA has already issued dozens of contracts for exploration in the high seas — with large areas covered by license-holders from China, the U.K., and Japan — the ISA Council has stated that no mining will occur without final regulations.

Environmental advocates say that a mining code is far from complete, underscoring the need to fill in scientific and ecological data gaps. Over 40 countries and multiple legal and environmental observers have now pushed for a moratorium, while mining proponents push to accelerate commercial guidelines.

“The science is not there,” Sofia Tsenikli, global campaign director of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, said in a statement. “Unlawful mining attempts continue unchallenged by states and the International Seabed Authority. None of these point toward deep-sea mining. It points towards precaution. It points toward a moratorium.”

Another sticking point during the meeting were tensions regarding unilateral moves outside of ISA authority, which further fragmented policy consensus. Leading into the meeting, the ISA was conducting an internal compliance inquiry into whether certain mining contractors were attempting to bypass international authority or breaching UNCLOS rules.

The investigation is linked to efforts by The Metals Company, the leading private developer aggressively pushing to start commercial seabed mining, to seek deep-sea mining pathways under U.S. domestic law, led by the Trump administration, rather than wait for an ISA consensus.

The ISA specified Nauru Ocean Resources Inc. (NORI), a subsidiary of The Metals Company, during its compliance inquiry. NORI held a 15-year seabed exploration contract that was set to expire on July 22, 2026, right in the middle of the two-week ISA negotiations. To keep its rights to explore a massive swath of the Pacific seafloor, NORI needed the ISA to approve a five-year extension.

But because of the investigation, NORI took the ISA to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) in May, in an attempt to freeze the investigation so it wouldn’t jeopardize their contract extension. However, just days before the ISA session, tribunal orders paved the way for the ISA’s internal probe to continue, putting a setback to NORI’s legal attempt to block the inquiry.

But despite the active compliance investigation and tribunal drama, the ISA Council still voted to extend NORI’s exploration contract during the meeting, with member states making it explicitly clear on the record that granting the extension was “not a sign of approval” for NORI’s conduct, nor is the company cleared of any wrongdoing. The internal investigation remains open.

The NORI saga loomed over the entire two-week negotiations, deepening the divide between the delegates. Environmental groups argue that extending a contract for a mining company under active investigation, especially given its connection to a firm exploring unilateral mining options with the Trump administration, showed the ISA is struggling to enforce its own boundaries.

“The decisions of this week show the [ISA] once again hindered by its outdated process to move swiftly on companies breaking international law,” said Emma Wilson, policy advisor with DSCC. “By delaying action on unlawful mining, the ISA is undermining confidence in its ability to regulate the industry.”

“If it cannot enforce the rules, it cannot manage exploitation,” she added.

When biologist Terry Hughes showed devastating aerial surveys of mass bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef to his students back in 2016, they wept. They discovered 93% of the largest living structure on Earth, stretching for more than 1,400 miles off Australia’s northeastern coast, suffered some degree of bleaching.

“It broke my heart to see so many corals dying on northern reefs on the Great Barrier Reef,” Hughes, director of the Arc Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, said then.

“With rising temperatures due to global warming, it’s only a matter of time before we see more of these events,” he added. Since that third global coral bleaching event from 2014 to 2017, the world has already gone through its fourth global coral bleaching event, which has officially gone down as the largest, most destructive, and most widespread mass bleaching event on record.

This catastrophe is a direct symptom of oceans warming at an alarming rate, driven by a century of fossil fuel production. For decades, major oil, gas, and coal companies have extracted resources, encroached on Indigenous lands, and pumped planet-warming pollution into the atmosphere. While many journalists have long documented that Big Oil was well aware it was driving a global climate crisis, a striking new dimension of the industry’s knowledge has just come to light.

New research published this week by the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme reveals that major fossil fuel companies knew since at least the 1980s that their products would specifically decimate global coral reefs.

The industry understood that its greenhouse gas emissions would trigger the exact formula for reef destruction that Hughes and the rest of the world are seeing today: extreme marine heatwaves, rapid ocean acidification, and intensified storms.

Big Oil knew since the 1980’s

By mapping out corporate records from the late 1970s and 1980s using artificial intelligence, researchers identified key documents proving that top officials and scientists at major fossil fuel companies including ExxonMobil and Shell explicitly foresaw the destruction of marine ecosystems.

One instance mentioned in the study was when James Black, Exxon’s research and engineering scientist in 1978, briefed the U.S. Department of Energy about the need to determine whether shallow-water carbonates, like corals, were dissolving due to rising carbon dioxide levels.

By the early 1980s, Exxon ran into a major dilemma with a newly discovered gas field near the Natuna Islands in the South China Sea, which contained over 70% carbon dioxide. If pumped into the atmosphere, Exxon knew it would make the field the largest point source of carbon pollution in the world, industry documents show. As an alternative, Exxon modeled an idea that would inject carbon emissions 140 meters deep into the ocean. They eventually discovered this would spike ocean acidification across the area, dissolving the calcium carbonate structures that corals and shellfish rely on to survive.

Meanwhile, a confidential 1986 internal memo by Shell’s “Greenhouse Effect Working Group” mapped out the exact mechanics of ocean acidification, warning that adding carbon emissions would cause ocean acidification, leading to massive marine die-offs and loss of natural barriers like corals.

Shell wrote at the time that the “dissolution of shells and corals and subsequently local but massive deaths of organisms... is therefore not unrealistic.” The report also accurately predicted that rapid ocean acidification in shallow coastal zones would destroy coral reefs and sediments. They warned this would wipe out natural shoreline protections and could lead to the complete “disappearance of complete coral islands,” the study showed.

Big Oil denied and downplayed threats

“We also found that, even decades later, the fossil fuel industry supported public-facing disinformation denying and downplaying the destructive effects of their products on coral reefs,” Franta, the study’s lead author, said.

As the scientific consensus on the climate crisis solidified, fossil fuel companies launched sophisticated public relations campaigns to muddy the waters, creating authoritative-looking reports designed to mimic official government science while downplaying the catastrophic threat to marine ecosystems like coral reefs.

In 2012, the Cato Institute, a U.S.-based thinktank heavily funded by ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, the Koch family, and other major players in the industry, published a 200-page report titled “Addendum: Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States.”

The report deliberately used the exact same title and nearly identical cover graphics as a seminal 2009 report by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. This is the original government report that had been the legal foundation for the Environmental Protection Agency’s ruling that greenhouse gases threaten public health, also known as the “endangerment finding,” which the Trump administration has since repealed.

Cato’s “addendum” was designed to neutralize that ruling by reassuring the public that climate impacts had “little national significance.” It also directly targeted the growing alarm over coral bleaching and ocean acidification by denying the crisis, normalizing ecosystem shifts, and claiming corals would actually benefit — all public disinformation.

The truth

Vandenberg, who has studied coral reef restoration, said that this issue goes beyond what fossil fuel companies knew, but also that “the costs of that obstruction are born unevenly by communities that depend on reef ecosystems,” reflecting a major power imbalance in which multinational corporations have the resources to fund research and influence public messaging, “while frontline communities are left to absorb the environmental and social consequences of delayed action.”

The stark reality is that mass coral bleaching and mortality are linked to warmer sea surface temperatures, caused by a climate crisis fueled by Big Oil. Unless the world begins making deep cuts to planet-warming pollution by phasing out the burning of fossil fuels, the scientists predict that all coral reefs would bleach around the world.

But it’s not all doom and gloom: New research presented at the recent Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, Kenya, found there are close to 166,000 square kilometers of reefs around the world that were potentially thriving under extreme temperatures in the Bahamas, Cuba, Australia, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

“It provides some hope,” Craig Dahlgren, executive director of the Perry Institute for Marine Science, who was not involved in the analysis, told the CBC last month. “Things are bad, but we do have places [where] there’s something about them and the corals there that we can learn from, build off of, and help ensure there’s a future for coral reefs.”

At the crack of dawn one June day in 2011, 32 Indonesian crew members of the fishing vessel Oyang 75 escaped into the port of Lyttelton, New Zealand. They were fleeing extreme labor abuses that ranged from debt bondage and wage theft to grueling work hours.

The ship they left behind was a Korean factory trawler, chartered by a New Zealand company to fish domestic waters. For decades, New Zealand fishing companies have relied on this exact arrangement: chartering foreign-owned and flagged deep-sea trawlers, largely from South Korea, to access lucrative offshore quotas at low operational costs.

But New Zealand’s industry is far from an isolated case. A recent paper published in the journal Marine Policy paints a damning picture of how the global seafood industry has developed a widespread system built on modern slavery, severe human rights violations, and environmental fraud.

The issue “should not be treated as a series of isolated scandals or a few bad actors at sea,” Abdirahim Sheik Heile, one of the paper's authors and a doctoral candidate in marine studies at Dalhousie University, told The Confluence. Instead, Sheik Heile argues that labor exploitation is a "structural feature of the global seafood economy."

That exploitation is only worsening under current economic pressures. With global grocery prices inflating at an alarming rate, the mounting pressure to keep seafood cheap is creating even stronger incentives to slash labor costs. According to Sheik Heile, who is also a fellow with Ocean Nexus, that cost-cutting directly manifests as wage theft, unsafe working conditions, excessive hours, debt bondage, and the denial of basic rights.

“When we talk about sustainable seafood, we cannot only ask whether the fish stock is healthy,” Sheik Heile said. “We also have to ask, who caught the fish, under what conditions, and who benefits from the value created?”

The paper also found a strong connection between workforce exploitation and illegal fishing, noting that the same governance gaps, vague vessel operations, and economic pressures fuel both crises simultaneously.

But unraveling this systemic crisis has proven difficult due to how these fleets operate. Daniel Salas, the paper’s lead author and a doctoral candidate of social anthropology at Dalhousie University, said “exploitation in fisheries operates through transnational systems fragmented by design.”

It’s almost a regulatory black hole, in which the process is split across so many nations that accountability completely vanishes: “Workers from one country may be recruited through brokers in another, labor on vessels flagged to a third country, fish in the waters of a fourth country, while the seafood itself enters supply chains somewhere else,” Salas told The Confluence. “That fragmentation is one reason exploitation becomes so difficult to monitor and regulate.”

The research began after the team realized that while a substantial body of work on labor exploitation and human rights abuses in fisheries already exists, it remains scattered across completely different disciplines and journals. By stepping back to review more than 50 studies based on primary data, the authors uncovered just how normalized and systemic labor exploitation has become in the global seafood industry.

“One thing that became very clear was just how invisible fish workers often are, even within governance systems supposedly designed to protect them,” Salas said. The most severe abuses, the study notes, appear repeatedly within industrial and distant-water fleets, particularly those relying heavily on migrant labor.

The authors also identified what they call an “uneven geography of scrutiny” in existing research. While much of the literature is heavily concentrated in Southeast and East Asia, vast stretches of the Atlantic, Africa, the Americas, and other major fishing nations remain deeply understudied.

“That doesn’t mean exploitation is absent in those places,” Sheik Heile said. “It means our knowledge is incomplete.”

That data gap is exactly why the 2011 New Zealand incident served as such a critical case study. “The documented abuses there shocked many observers precisely because the country was not imagined as a major site of labor exploitation,” Salas explained.

Today, these systemic vulnerabilities are colliding with a worsening climate crisis. Record temperatures are triggering a dramatic shift in fish migration patterns, making fish harder to find and forcing vessels to travel further and stay at sea longer. Because these extended voyages burn far more fuel, fleets are facing a brutal economic squeeze — one that Sheik Heile warns directly exacerbates labor exploitation in a fiercely competitive market.

“This is why climate change and ocean warming are also labor issues,” he said. “Ecological stress can intensify economic stress, and economic stress can intensify labor exploitation.”

Read more: A Fleet Prone to Captive Labor and Plunder, The Outlaw Ocean Project

To prevent even more abuse, researchers argue that climate adaptation plans and fisheries management must look beyond fish stocks to protect the people harvesting them. Effective reform, according to the study, requires a comprehensive overhaul: decent work protections, fair wages, secure contracts, and confidential worker reporting systems. It also demands targeted port inspections that assess labor conditions and overall accountability across the seafood value chain. For small-scale fishers, it means legally protecting their access rights, local markets, and coastal livelihoods from unfair competition by massive industrial fleets.

Rising inflation is already forcing shoppers to rethink their seafood spending. But researchers say it should also force a deeper reconsideration of the global supply chain.

Sheik Heile said his message is simple: “Loving seafood should also mean caring about the people who catch it,” urging consumers to ask harder questions about labor conditions.

As economic pressures tighten across the globe, the authors maintain that true sustainability can no longer be measured purely by grocery store price tags or healthy fish stocks.

“Seafood sustainability cannot only be about fish; it must also be about human dignity,” Sheik Heile said. “A fish cannot be called sustainable if it reaches the plate through exploitation. If we want healthy oceans, we need to protect the people who work at sea.”

In other news ….

Trump goes after ocean monitoring. The Trump administration is dismantling a $368 million deep-sea monitoring system that was put in place a decade ago to examine coastal environments, marine ecosystems and powerful currents that affect the global climate. The National Science Foundation, which has been stripped off federal funding, said it would send ships this month to remove over 900 deep-sea instruments anchored off Oregon, Washington, Alaska, North Carolina, and an area between Greenland and Iceland known as the Irminger Sea. The New York Times reports.

Aotearoa marine sanctuaries. New Zealand just established five new marine reserves along the Otago coast, marking the country’s first new marine sanctuaries in over a decade. Oceanographic Magazine reports.

More El Niño woes. The expected arrival of El Niño in the coming months could trigger another mass coral bleaching event, just a year after the last one ended, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned this week. If it happens, this would mark the fifth global mass bleaching incident in recorded history. CBS reports.

In April, the world witnessed the terrifying fury of the most powerful tropical cyclone recorded globally in 2026. Super Typhoon Sinlaku exploded into the second strongest Pacific typhoon ever observed so early in the year, carving a path of unprecedented ruin through Micronesia.

But before it barreled north to ultimately wreak havoc on the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands — stalling offshore for hours and grinding the islands of Saipan and Tinian beneath its monstrous eyewall — Sinlaku delivered its first catastrophic blow on another Pacific island: Chuuk.

Chuuk is an island state within the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), a sovereign nation in the Pacific Ocean with a special agreement with the United States called the Compact of Free Association (COFA). Under COFA, the country relies on the U.S. for financial assistance as well as defense and security. In exchange, the U.S. holds strategic military access across Micronesia.

Disaster relief in the FSM operates under a completely different framework than in U.S. states or U.S. territories like the Northern Mariana Islands or Puerto Rico. Under COFA, FSM’s government must formally request American aid on behalf of affected states like Chuuk. Once requested, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) deploys alongside the State Department’s newly formed Bureau of Disaster and Humanitarian Response — which absorbed these international relief duties following the dissolution of USAID — blending American emergency resources with FSM’s own local revenue streams to fund the recovery.

But Chuuk’s geography is uniquely challenging: its population is scattered across 40 separately inhabited islands, each operating as its own distinct municipality. Spanning thousands of square miles of open ocean, simply transporting aid, construction materials, and personnel between these isolated communities makes the current recovery an exceptionally costly and complex race against time.

Chuuk was already deeply vulnerable before Super Typhoon Sinlaku struck. The last major storm to hit the island was 2015’s Typhoon Maysak, destroying thousands of homes and marking the island’s worst extreme weather disaster in over twenty years. And because that recovery was so painfully slow, many displaced residents were ultimately forced to leave the island entirely, migrating to Guam, Hawai’i, or the continental U.S.

It’s been over a month since Sinlaku hit, and thousands of people across Chuuk and the Northern Mariana Islands still have no power or access to running water, largely relying on mutual aid efforts. The latest death toll has risen to 17 across the region, mostly on the island of Chuuk.

“Many people are still very much impacted by the loss,” Joe-Silem Enlet, a doctoral candidate in marine affairs at the University of Rhode Island and research fellow with Ocean Nexus, told The Confluence. “Everyone is connected in some way, so grief moves through the whole community, not just individual families.”

I recently caught up with Enlet, who is also a political consultant and advisor to the Weno municipality, the storm’s hardest hit area in Chuuk, a month after Super Typhoon Sinlaku ravaged both our home islands.

This interview has been slightly edited for length and clarity.

Rachel: First off, how has it been since Typhoon Sinlaku pummeled Chuuk? I’ve been hyper-focused on what the storm did to my hometown in the Northern Marianas, but I’ve seen the death toll rise in your home island. How are you doing? How has it been?

Joe: It’s been difficult, to be honest. Typhoon Sinlaku has disrupted many lives for sure. The immediate damage left homes damaged, infrastructure impacted, communities cut off, but what lingers is the slower, heavier reality of recovery.

For me personally, it’s been a mix of concern, frustration, and responsibility — concern for family and community on the ground, frustration at how limited and slow support can sometimes feel, and a deep sense that we have to show up for each other in whatever ways we can, locally and across our islands. At the same time, there’s also resilience. People are sharing what they have, rebuilding together, checking in on one another. That’s something storms don’t take away.

I’ve been following what happened in the Northern Marianas too, and am really sorry to hear about your hometown. These storms remind us how connected our experiences are across the Pacific, even when we’re each dealing with our own immediate crises.

Rachel: Thank you so much. It’s hard to talk about policy or long-term adaptation when people are still clearing debris and helping neighbors, but what are your thoughts on post-disaster recovery and adaptation in our home islands as the climate crisis intensifies more storms like it did Typhoon Sinlaku? What do you think needs to happen?

Joe: That’s a really important question, and honestly, something we need to be talking about more seriously.

I think one of the biggest issues with post-disaster recovery in our islands is that it’s still too reactive. A storm like Typhoon Sinlaku hits, and then we scramble. Aid comes in, assessments get done, things get patched up, but we’re not always building back in a way that actually prepares us for the next one.

What needs to happen is a shift from short-term recovery to long-term resilience. That means stronger infrastructure, but also investing in local systems: food security, water systems, community-based response networks. The things that actually sustain people when outside help is delayed.

I also think what’s missing is trust in local knowledge and leadership. Too often, recovery plans are driven by outside frameworks that don’t fully understand how our communities function. But our people already know how to adapt, we’ve been doing it for generations. That knowledge needs to be centered more.

Rachel: The Northern Marianas is a U.S. territory, but Chuuk is part of the Compact of Free Association (COFA) agreement with the U.S., which many people don’t really know the meaning of. What are your thoughts on Chuuk’s relationship with the U.S. in terms of disaster recovery?

Joe: That’s a great question, because a lot of people hear “COFA” but don’t really know what it means in practice.

Here’s the key part: the funding [from the U.S.] doesn’t always flow as directly or as quickly as people might expect. Because FSM is not a U.S. state or territory, there are additional layers, coordination between national and state governments, approvals, and sometimes limitations on what programs apply. That can slow things down.

A lot of disaster relief also depends on pre-existing agreements, available funding under COFA, and how well systems are set up to receive and distribute aid. That’s why you sometimes see gaps between when a disaster hits and when meaningful assistance reaches communities.

At the same time, local governments and communities play a huge role. In many cases, immediate response and early recovery are carried by families, municipalities, churches, and local networks long before outside assistance fully arrives.

So COFA creates a relationship where support is there, but it’s not the same as being fully inside the U.S. system. That difference really shows during disasters.

Rachel: This brings us to a conversation about sovereignty. Chuuk is not a sovereign nation itself but a state within the Federated States of Micronesia. With the rising intensity of storms, many argue that current disaster relief is a form of “climate colonialism.” What specific policy shifts do you think would allow small island states like Chuuk to move from surviving the next storm to thriving in a way that doesn’t rely on a constant influx of external aid? Is it even possible?

Joe: That’s a hard question, but it’s the right one.

I do think there’s truth in the idea of “climate colonialism,” especially when recovery keeps us dependent where we’re waiting on outside timelines, priorities, and even definitions of what resilience even looks like. For a place like Chuuk, within the Federated States of Micronesia under the Compact of Free Association, that dependency can get built into the system.

But I also think it is possible to move toward something different, though it won’t be quick, and it won’t be purely internal either. Some things need to shift for sure. We have to invest in local capacity as the foundation, not as an afterthought. That means directing funding, whether from COFA, climate finance, or development partners, straight into state and municipal systems, and even community-level institutions, so they can actually plan, implement, and respond on their own terms. Right now, too much capacity sits outside, in consultants and external agencies.

Food and water sovereignty has to be treated as disaster policy, not just development. If communities can reliably feed themselves and access clean water after a storm, that alone reduces dependency dramatically. Those can help create a resilient system.

Infrastructure needs to be rethought for our context and not just imported from the outside. We keep rebuilding the same vulnerable systems. What would it look like to design housing, energy, and transport around storm realities and local materials, informed by Indigenous knowledge and practices that already understood these environments?

Is full independence from external aid realistic? Probably not in the near term. These are small island economies facing global-scale climate impacts. But reducing chronic dependency, that’s absolutely possible. Besides, each island community in Chuuk and across Micronesia have been resilient and able to survive for thousands of years on their own.

Nevertheless, the goal isn’t to cut off relationships. It’s to rebalance them, so support strengthens local systems instead of replacing them.

Rachel: To ensure that the people of the Marianas and Chuuk aren’t perpetually forced into this state of emergency, how do we hold space for both the urgent needs of today and the long-term structural changes — like ocean sovereignty or local grids — that would finally break this cycle of constant rebuilding?

Joe: That tension is real and I think a lot of our communities are living in it right now.

When a storm hits, the priority is immediate: clearing debris, checking on family, getting water and food, just making sure people are okay. But at the same time, if we only stay in that emergency mode, we can end up repeating the same cycle every year. So it shouldn’t be one or the other but how we intentionally link the two.

One way is making sure that recovery dollars, whether through national systems, COFA support, or partners, aren’t just used to restore what was lost, but to quietly build toward something different. For example, if you’re rebuilding homes, can they be designed for stronger storms? If you’re restoring water systems, can they be more decentralized and managed by the community?

Another part is who is doing the planning? Communities themselves don’t always have the space to think long-term when they’re in crisis. That’s where governments, local leaders, and institutions need to step in, not to impose solutions, but to hold that longer vision on behalf of the people, while still staying grounded in what communities actually want.

I also think we need to treat things like ocean sovereignty and local energy systems (like community-based grids) not as abstract policy goals, but as disaster response strategies. Because they are. The more control you have over your food, your water, your energy, your ocean space, the less dependent you are when the next storm hits.

Rachel: Pacific islanders are on the front lines of storms they didn’t cause. What does a just recovery look like? How do we support “ocean equity” so that Indigenous knowledge isn’t lost or replaced by outside technology during the recovery?

Joe: Pacific Islanders are dealing with impacts we didn’t create, and yet we’re often expected to adapt on terms that aren’t our own.

In terms of ocean governance, a just recovery shouldn’t just be about rebuilding infrastructure or restoring fisheries, but about restoring relationships. Relationships between people and ocean, between communities, and even between knowledge systems. Too often, recovery efforts treat the ocean as a resource to be managed, rather than a living system we are part of.

“Ocean equity,” to me, means that the people who are most connected to and dependent on the ocean, like our fishers, our coastal communities, our knowledge holders, are the ones shaping how recovery happens. One of the biggest risks after disasters is that outside solutions come in fast with new technologies, new management systems, new data-driven approaches, and they can unintentionally displace Indigenous knowledge. Not because that knowledge isn’t effective, but because it isn’t always recognized as “legitimate” in those systems.

So supporting ocean equity means a few key things like protecting and prioritizing Indigenous knowledge as governance, not just culture. That means recognizing traditional fishing practices, seasonal knowledge, and reef stewardship as valid forms of management, and not something to be replaced by external science, but something that science should work alongside.

My concern is always ensuring that communities have real authority over their marine spaces and how they manage those spaces. I think it is also very crucial to invest in the next generation of knowledge holders. If young people are disconnected from fishing practices, language, and ocean relationships, then recovery, even if it looks successful on paper, is actually a loss.

Editor’s Note: You’ll notice a shift in format this week. I’m highlighting a panel I recently participated in because the discussion perfectly captures why I started The Confluence.

Critical stories are emerging from the world’s oceans, yet they barely make a ripple in headlines. From an ongoing marine contamination crisis in the eastern shores of Papua New Guinea to the aftermath of a rare early-season super typhoon that battered the Marianas archipelago, these events highlight the urgent need for more news coverage of the world’s oceans.

The ocean functions as the planet’s primary life-support system, covering over 70 percent of the Earth’s surface and holding 97 percent of its water. But while the ocean serves everyone, its benefits and burdens are not shared equally. For too long, governments and corporations have prioritized industrial extraction, militarization, and global markets over the local communities that have stewarded these waters for generations.

That was the topic I discussed alongside fellow journalists on a panel at the Society for Environmental Journalists conference in Chicago on April 18. The session spotlighted the work of three fellows, including myself, of the Metcalf Ocean Nexus Academy, which provides journalists with financial support to cover stories that highlight ocean equity.

Ocean equity involves ensuring appropriate support and rights for people who have been marginalized by factors such as race, gender, class, or geography, and addressing the structural inequalities that shape their lives, according to the Ocean Nexus website. In this sense, equity is not about treating everyone the same – it is about prioritizing those who have been placed at disadvantage.

For Eva Tesfaye, a MONA fellow and coastal reporter with WWNO, New Orleans Public Radio, reporting on ocean equity looks like reporting on migrant workers at fishing and seafood processing industries beyond the usually suspected countries, and instead, focusing on the United States. During her reporting, she found that when employers are unable to find people domestically willing to do these hands-on jobs, they often turn to foreign workers with less protections.

When covering the oceans, Tesfaye encourages journalists to ask themselves, “What groups of people are underrepresented when it comes to sharing this global resource?”

Luis Joel Méndez González, another MONA fellow and a Puerto Rico-based investigative reporter with Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, said applying ocean equity to his reporting means diving into the tourism industry by examining the strain on basic infrastructure, gentrification, and its connection to the ongoing climate crisis.

“It is impossible to report from an equitable and fair perspective if we don’t dive into what people on the ground actually think and compare it with data,” Méndez González said, underscoring that governments often leave communities with no choice but to rely on private interests. “Most of the time, despite understanding the harm ocean-related economies can cause to the environment, communities prioritize their economic well-being because they have to survive.”

This tension is nowhere more evident than in the growing race to mine the deep seas, one of the last untouched frontier on Earth. As mining corporations promise jobs and economic autonomy to small-island developing nations in exchange for mining leases, stories of deep-sea mining often skip over the voices of the local communities who will bear the environmental cost.

Deep-sea mining is being sold as a climate necessity, but many experts say it is not needed for the larger “green revolution.” As part of my fellowship, I have been reporting on deep-sea mining for months now. I believe we cannot report on deep-sea extraction without centering the people, particularly Indigenous Pacific Islanders, the industry claims to empower.

Other ways journalists can spot stories of ocean equity include looking at how coastal communities often bear the brunt of pollution, rising sea levels, and climate change-fueled disasters, despite contributing the least to the problem. One can also look at how small-scale fishers frequently lose access to traditional waters to make way for large-scale commercial interests.

The ocean also absorbs roughly 90 percent of the excess heat generated by planet-warming pollution, which places an immense burden on ecosystems. When waters warm, high-value fish species move toward the poles, often avoiding the tropical or subtropical waters where local, small-scale fishers have relied on them for generations. This means large, high-tech trawlers from big fishing companies are able to chase stocks into regions, while the local community or small-scale fishers who are legally or physically tethered to their home waters face the economic burden.

So when the ocean bears the burden of our excess heat, it’s important to pay attention to the most vulnerable communities who pay the price. The ocean is speaking, and here at The Confluence, we are ready to listen. Are you?

SOS Signal

Super Typhoon Sinlaku just pummeled the islands of Chuuk, Guam, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. The Marianas islands of Tinian and Saipan, where I was born and raised, suffered the most damages as Sinlaku’s eye stalled offshore for hours, grinding the islands beneath its eyewall.

These islands need your help. Here is the full list of resources.

• Relief aid for the Marianas. Donate to this GoFundMe.

• Relief aid for Chuuk. Donate to this GoFundMe.

• Donate directly to the Micronesia Climate Change Alliance and type ‘Sinlaku’

• For those stateside, contribute via this Amazon wish list for CNMI and Guam relief.

• Donate to the following drop-off sites in the U.S. mainland for CNMI and Guam.

  

This article was produced by The Confluence and co-published by The Xylom, a nonprofit news outlet covering global health and environmental disparities. Subscribe to their newsletter here.

In the villages of Kafkaf and Manggai, in Papua New Guinea’s New Ireland Province, the morning ritual is no longer about the catch, but about the count. For months, the ocean has been washing its dead marine life ashore. Schools of fish are dying across a number of sites, while more than a thousand people have reported skin burns, respiratory illnesses, and gastrointestinal symptoms after being in contact with the ocean. For some, skin lesions are taking about a month to heal.

It is still unclear what’s causing the toxic event. Coastal communities first reported the contamination to the Papua New Guinea government last December, and although environment officials eventually collected water samples, promising a two-week turnaround, the results were never released.

As months passed and pressure mounted, government silence forced local hands. John Aini, founder of the Indigenous-led marine conservation group Ailan Awareness, and local journalist Rebecca Marigu began mapping the disaster in real-time. In just five days, they documented over 3,400 dead marine organisms spanning 15 different species.

“It was quite shocking,” Marigu, who founded Siro Media, told The Confluence. “For us islanders, we’ve been people who have always depended on the ocean. The ocean is our life. It’s our source of protein, our source of income … our whole life revolves and is generated from the ocean.”

In response, an international campaign rapidly gained momentum, uniting scientists, journalists, and activists with the local community. This collective effort raised $11,000 in emergency relief, providing essential water tanks, medical supplies, and food, as well as sandbags to defend against the encroaching king tide surges.

It also put pressure on the government, which Marigu said “only decided to investigate when the world was watching.”

On March 17, it seemed like the campaign reached a feat when the Minister for Fisheries Jelta Wong addressed the issue on the floor of Papua New Guinea’s Parliament. “At this point in time it’s really hard for me to tell you what chemical it is because we’re looking at all options,” Wong said. “There’s a lot of activity along that coast there, they’re looking at different types of chemicals.”

Wong publicly committed to delivering laboratory investigation results by March 31, a deadline the government missed without issuing any statement.

As of April 7, communities are still waiting on results, while the crisis continues to spread. More dead fish, primarily blue-striped herring, are washing ashore. An unusual pungent, sulfurous odor hangs over the reef areas. This contamination has now reached local creeks, triggering water insecurity for nearby residents. Fishers who rely on the ocean for income are treading water. Researchers say the toxic event may represent a cultural tipping point.

“Now that [the government] thinks attention has moved on, they’ve gone quiet again,” Marigu said. “It hasn’t moved on.”

‘The ocean is our life’

Nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the Bismarck Sea, Papua New Guinea is home to vast, shimmering coral reefs that support more than 3,000 fish species. At its northeastern edge lies New Ireland, a mountainous island where the economy is driven by the land and sea. But here, the geography itself is working against the ocean. The island’s limestone foundation is dangerously permeable, allowing toxic chemicals to bypass natural buffers and seep straight into the coastal waters that feed its people.

New Ireland Province is home to several Indigenous communities, where fishing is not just an important industry but a fundamental pillar of their existence. For the roughly 77% of the population living along New Ireland’s coastline and surrounding islands, the ocean serves as both their primary supermarket and bank account.

This absolute reliance on marine resources guarantees that any disruption to the ocean’s health — whether from a changing climate or industrial activity — directly threatens the survival of New Ireland’s coastal communities, Marigu said.

Still, industrial extraction is everywhere. For instance, Lihir Island, roughly 75 miles east of affected communities, is home to one of the world’s largest gold mines. The island has a long history of environmental controversy around its deep sea waste disposal. A second gold mine on Simberi Island also went through a major change in ownership last December, the same month communities first reported contamination. Then there’s the palm oil plantations operating near some of the impacted communities on the east coast, raising concerns about agricultural runoff.

Bodhi Patil, ocean advocate and founder of the InnerLight Foundation, came to New Ireland in March to deploy a grant for a coral restoration initiative called the ENB Sea Keepers. But what was intended to be a three-day visit turned into over two weeks of calling attention to an escalating crisis. Using his strong social media platform, Patil helped launch an international campaign during his time there.

“This was totally unexpected; some people call it divine timing, some people call it a coincidence,” he told The Confluence. Patil felt the impacts himself, falling sick on his first day in the village. Later while paddling out in the ocean, he felt his legs burn immediately.

Scientists involved in the international response to the crisis on the ground have identified possible causes as the community waits for official results from the lab. Contamination from the mining industry and agricultural runoff may be the chief contributing factors, they say. Although experts did consider harmful algal bloom, they noted that the severity of skin burns and cross-species die-off pattern is not consistent with toxic algae exposure. Deep-sea mining was also ruled out as a source, since the mining is happening on the opposite coastline.

“These communities understand the value and importance of water, and whether that’s in scarcity or abundance, it’s essential to all life,” Patil said. “And in these communities, especially in New Ireland Province and the Indigenous villagers here, they understand that if they don’t have a healthy ocean, they don’t have a healthy livelihood or a healthy economy.”

A cultural tipping point

New Ireland’s marine contamination event is just as much a cultural crisis as it is an environmental one.

Jessica Vandenberg, an environmental social scientist at the University of Rhode Island, said this could be a “cultural tipping point,” a concept developed by Ocean Nexus to show how the slow violence of ocean pollution damages both peoples’ physical health and cultural identity. In the study, they argue that current ocean policies fail because they only track physical data, and ignore the deeper issue: how pollution destroys the critical, lived connection between people and the sea.

When industrial mining releases heavy metals into the water, for instance, the damage isn’t just the toxicity of the fish, but also the loss of the communities’ act of fishing. And if a species central to a community’s identity — like a tuna or shark — becomes too contaminated to eat, the entire social fabric from traditional knowledge to food sovereignty collapses.

Culturally significant food sources like local fish allow communities to avoid reliance on global markets and purchased imports, Vandenberg, lead author of the cultural tipping points study, told The Confluence. Losing access to these foods undermines cultural practices and livelihoods, she added.

In the case of New Ireland, the consequences appear more instantaneous. This sudden shock has made traditional fishing and ocean life feel unsafe, causing a rapid loss of trust in the sea. If this continues, research says people’s ways of living could shift dramatically.

“The people most affected by pollution are not the ones who are responsible for producing it,” said Vandenberg, noting that this new framework could “hold polluters accountable and call for increased regulations of pollutants.”

Already, Patil said he’s seeing children avoid swimming in the ocean, which for centuries has been an integral part of the local islanders’ upbringing. This becomes a tipping point when the contamination becomes so severe that a community is forced to abandon its ancestral relationship with the ocean, leading to a permanent loss of heritage that no amount of economic compensation can fix.

“The hardest part for me is watching the children, knowing that their normal daily lives are being affected and being restrained from having access to the ocean and the sea, which is part of growing up for me as a child,” Marigu said. “It’s something that no child should ever be put through.”

It is still unclear what is causing the marine contamination event due to a significant delay in lab results from the samples the government has taken. As of April, no tissue sampling of marine animals has been done due to lack of equipment on the ground. Locals are now exploring independent laboratory testing outside of the government.

“We are all still waiting for answers,” Marigu said. “I want policymakers to think about the future generation and have compassion and empathy and that at the end of the day, every decision we make either will make us or break us, and children are either going to suffer or they are going to thrive with every policymaking decision.”

How can you help?

“We need longer term solutions to solve these issues into the future and do more than just rapid response,” Patil said. “Human lives should be valued and people on the front lines of ocean injustices should be protected.”

Donate. Support the community directly by contributing through this GoFundMe campaign. The initial money raised will be used for food, water tanks, and medicine for the people affected with severe skin and health conditions.

Experts needed. Local groups are calling on researchers and technical experts with backgrounds in marine ecology, ecotoxicology, ocean pollution, spatial analysis, public health, and environmental data science to support the analysis of monitoring data collected. If this is you, fill out this form.

Government pressure. “Put pressure on responsible authorities in your home country and in Papua New Guinea to address issues that are within their jurisdiction,” Patil said.

“The amount of joy that these children have despite the pain they’re suffering is something we can all learn from,” Patil said. “In a time of world crisis and hatred and discrimination and war, love is the way forward, and the ocean is a bountiful place of love when it’s protected.”

After two weeks of negotiations in Kingston, Jamaica, delegates and environmental advocates this week concluded a pivotal meeting on the future of deep-sea mining with no mining approved.

The talks are hosted by the International Seabed Authority, the UN body responsible for regulating all resource and mining-related activities happening within international waters. Their mission is guided by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which defines the deep seabed as the “common heritage of humankind.” This means these areas belong to no single nation and must be managed for the collective benefit of everyone.

The ISA and member states are trying to finalize what’s called the “mining code,” which is essentially exploitation regulations that the ISA is actively negotiating on to govern commercial-scale deep-sea mining. While the ISA has issued dozens of contracts for exploration in the international seabed — with large areas covered by license-holders from China, the U.K., Belgium, and Japan — the ISA Council has stated that no mining will occur without final regulations.

Unlike her predecessor who wanted industrial-scale deep-sea mining to happen quickly, ISA Secretary-General Leticia Carvalho has said she wants to prioritize a mining code that is “science-based, transparent, and neutral.”

“I would say my hope is to bring these negotiations to the point where adoption (of a mining code) becomes achievable,” Carvalho told reporters during a press briefing on Thursday, noting that it is necessary to adopt a “mining code with robust safeguards.”

However, many delegates and environmental advocates in the room warn that a mining code is far from complete. They argue that regulations cannot be safely adopted without addressing missing scientific data and a broader ocean governance framework that centers equity, environmental protections, and economic commissions.

“The deep sea is the largest and least understood ecosystem on Earth,” said Sofia Tsenikli, director of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition’s deep-sea mining moratorium campaign. “We simply do not have the science, baseline data, or ecological understanding of the deep sea and the benefits it provides to confidently build and finalize a regulatory system for industrial extraction.”

US vs the Marianas Islands

The growing scientific concern against seabed mining, however, has not slowed the geopolitical momentum led by the United States, which continues to prioritize economic security over rigorous scientific evidence and equitable benefit-sharing less wealthy nations are seeking out.

Although the US is not a member of the ISA and has not ratified UNCLOS — often referred to as the “constitution of the oceans” — it still plays an observer role during the meetings. And as small-island states called for a moratorium on deep-sea mining at the international stage, back in Washington, the US had something else in mind.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced plans to nearly double the size of the seafloor area it is eyeing around the Marianas archipelago. The leasing area of 69.1 million acres — an area bigger than New Zealand — would bring mineral extraction closer to the U.S. territories of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.

The announcement comes two months after the Trump administration received more than 65,000 comments opposing deep-sea mining, sending anger and frustration among many local community members.

Angelo Villagomez, senior fellow for the Center for American Progress, said the decision “ignores the overwhelming concerns voiced by the people and local governments” of the American territories of Guam and Northern Marianas.

“It pushes forward an industrial experiment in one of the most biodiverse and culturally significant ocean regions on Earth,” Villagomez, who is CHamoru from the Marianas island of Saipan. “This decision ignores baseline science and was made without meaningful consultation or any guarantee that the Indigenous peoples most affected would even be protected, let alone see benefits.”

Moreover, against the backdrop of the conclusion of ISA meetings on Thursday, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi — whose nation recently mined rare earth elements from the deep seas near Minamitorishima Island — paid Trump a visit to the White House.

Although the meeting was largely to discuss the war on Iran, both the U.S. and Japanese leaders unveiled a joint action plan to advance critical minerals and rare earths development without China playing a key part in the supply chain. The deal comes after both countries signed an agreement on rare earths in October 2025 to counter China’s dominance on mineral exports.

More work to be done

These actions from the Trump administration signal a growing issue with regards to unilateral mining, critics warn, which has been a major talking point during the ISA meetings over the last two weeks.

The US may not have obligations under international law as a non-member state, but Carvalho warns that member states, like Japan, do have obligations to abide by international law throughout the supply chain.

“Engaging with actions to mine the deep sea outside of the ISA regime could open doors to actions deemed as breaches of international law,” the Secretary-General said.

More than 40 countries, alongside major businesses, Indigenous leaders, scientists, and fishing industry associations, now support some form of a pause or moratorium on deep-sea mining.

The ISA and member states are set to head back to Jamaica for the next round of meetings in July. For now, Carvalho said, “We keep working, taking stock, identifying gaps, mapping where the states agree and where they disagree, and continue to negotiate until consensus can be achieved.”

On my reading list

Butterflies crossing oceans, moths navigating by the stars: unravelling the mysteries of insect migrations, The Guardian

‘We Live in One Ocean’: Native Hawaiian Activist Calls for Inclusion in Deep-Sea Mining Decisions, InsideClimate News

The Weather Is Getting Wilder, and Some See a Dire Signal in the Data, The New York Times

The growing allure — and danger — of glacier tourism. Grist

When war erupts in the Middle East, energy markets and attacks on critical infrastructure often dominate conversations outside the region. But for coastal communities along the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, the greater concern spans far beyond oil and gas prices. It’s their safety, livelihoods, food security, and the decades-long ecological fallout that follows.

As the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran escalates and casualties mount, the Persian Gulf has once again been transformed into an active warzone, specifically centered on the Strait of Hormuz, where the U.S. has struck Iranian vessels laying mines. While this narrow corridor is widely talked about as a global energy chokepoint — handling 20% of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas — it is far more than a transit point for commodities. These same waters nurture sprawling mangrove forests, fragile coral reefs, and wetlands that serve as critical ecosystems for many species and coastal communities.

For those living along the south Iranian coast, in particular, “the strait is something much more personal,” said Nasir Tighsazzadeh, a doctoral student in resource and environmental management at Simon Fraser University and a fellow with Ocean Nexus. Born and raised in Isfahan, a central city in Iran, Tighsazzadeh is no stranger to Iran’s southern coast.

“It is where fishers leave the harbor before sunrise, where families have earned their living for generations, and where coastal culture has long been tied to the rhythms of the sea,” he told The Confluence.

When the strait is attacked, the cascading consequences come at a huge price. The resulting contamination from toxic chemicals threatens the very biological foundations of the region. Oil spills suffocate the mangroves that act as a natural coastal defense and poison the seagrass beds essential to sea turtles, juvenile fishes, and invertebrates. Then there’s the human cost: war threatens not only immediate safety but also the fisheries and desalination infrastructure that millions in the region rely on for food and water.

In war zones, mobility is a luxury. History shows that people with means will move to save their lives, but many who lack such a capacity to escape are left behind, trapped in the crossfire as likely collateral damage of a conflict they cannot outrun. But they will do what they can, like go fishing, to survive. Hazem Almassry, postdoctoral research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies in Taipei, says Persian Gulf communities know this script all too well.

In Hormozgan Province, Iran’s largest fishing province, fishing is baked in the fabric of the community. In the Salakh village, located south of Qeshm Island, for example, people celebrate the Fisherman’s Norooz (Norooz-e Sayyad), also known as the “new year” for fishermen, in July. During this day, people don’t fish or consume seafood to give marine species a break for reproduction, while they dance to the beat of drums and enjoy local non-seafood delicacies.

Thousands of small-scale fishers rely on these waters each day, Tighsazzadeh said. In coastal towns like Bandar Abbas, situated at the critical gateway of the Strait of Hormuz, fishing is the primary source of income for many households who navigate the waters in small, resource-strapped, family-owned vessels.

“So when tension rises and the sea becomes militarized, the first people who feel it are not oil companies or global markets,” said Tighsazzadeh. “It is the fishers in small boats whose safety and livelihood depend on calm waters.”

The war is a threat-multiplier to these communities already living with economic uncertainty, blistering climate change-fueled heat, and limited job opportunities outside the ocean. With conflict turning fishing routes into danger zones, Tighsazzadeh warned of fewer trips, unstable income, and intensified pressure on families already on the brink of survival.

More indirect impacts include the weakening of ocean governance when geopolitical tensions dominate decision-making. Monitoring becomes less consistent, scientific cooperation declines, and ecological concerns become an afterthought, a theme already unfolding in the U.S. under the Trump regime. Over time, Tighsazzadeh said this lack of governance can “quietly erode the resilience of marine habitats that support fisheries in both the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, where many migratory fish stocks move between ecosystems.”

As the war continues, researchers who grew up in the Middle East have expressed concerns about how the region’s marine ecosystem will fare in the long run. “Conflict doesn’t pause ecosystems,” Almassry said.

Legacy pollution from war, increased vessel traffic, and reduced environmental oversight jeopardizes coral habitats, mangroves and fish nurseries. The long-term effects tend to appear years later in the form of dwindling fish populations, and when that delayed ecological damage finally becomes apparent, coastal communities are hit the hardest.

“The mangrove forests along the Iranian coast, the coral systems in the Gulf of Oman, they are absorbing the chemical and acoustic footprint of this right now, quietly, with no press coverage,” Almassry said. “We have some record of what the 1991 Gulf War oil spills did to the [Persian] Gulf’s marine life. We are still reading those consequences.”

“This war will leave its own sediment.”

Figure of the week: 132 million

Up to 132 million more people than previously estimated are currently living in the path of rising seas, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. Researchers highlighted a 10-inch sea-level underestimate that hits the Indo-Pacific and Southeast Asia regions hardest. | Source: Nature

On my reading list:

Indigenous rights, the environment, and international law: What’s at stake at this week’s seabed mining talks, Grist

Global sea levels have been underestimated due to poor modelling, research suggests, The Guardian

Wars Like Ukraine and Iran Are Pushing Countries To Rethink How They Get Their Energy, TIME

War in Iran Could Lead to Food Shortages in Region, Experts Warn, The New York Times

Southern Right Whales Are Having Fewer Calves; Scientists Say a Warming Ocean Is to Blame, Inside Climate News

From high above the coastline, the data paints a picture of victory. Below, a protected stretch of ocean teems with recovering marine life, while a new renewable energy hub powers the coast. To the untrained eye, this is a double win for the planet: a strike against the climate crisis and a safeguard for biodiversity.

But as you zoom in, the reality on the ground tells a different story.

The newly built cluster of renewable energy actually sits directly atop ancestral fishing grounds, and the energy it generates powers a city miles away. Likewise, the areas in the ocean meant to conserve marine life has quietly painted local, Indigenous families as “trespassers” on the waters that have fed them for generations.

Two new studies suggest that current efforts to manage our oceans are missing the mark. By favoring wealthy regions and theoretical success, most data and global policies are often blind to human equity and the actual needs of local communities.

The first study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, highlights a massive missed opportunity for green energy. While coastlines in Oceania, South America, and Africa have some of the highest potential for new renewable energy projects, they receive almost zero investment. Instead, funding continues to pour into large-scale projects in regions that are already energy-rich.

“We have to make sure that this investment includes building industries in the places where people need the most support,” Andrés M. Cisneros-Montemayor, lead author of the study, assistant professor at Simon Fraser University, and deputy director of Ocean Nexus, told The Confluence.

The second paper, published in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment, found a troubling bias in how the success of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), or ocean conservation zones, is measured. The research suggests that because many studies rely on second-hand theories and data rather than direct evidence, the ways these “protected” zones can accidentally harm the very people living near them — such as local communities losing their homes or being banned from fishing their own waters — are often ignored.

“All data is a result of choices,” Gerald S. Singh, lead author of the study, associate professor at the University of Victoria, and deputy science director at Ocean Nexus, told The Confluence. “When the choices made to create data are biased, bigger and more data does not rectify the problem but entrenches them,” noting that it “gives a sense of certainty around misleading findings.”

Singh’s research concluded that while marine protected areas can spark jobs and food security, they aren’t guaranteed. He said, in fact, these area-based conservation tools have “mixed effects” across almost every U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, the shared international roadmap to end poverty and protect the planet by 2030.

Researchers argue that policymakers shouldn’t just set a goal to protect just 30% of the planet and call it a day. Instead, they suggest tailoring solutions to the local context. Every community is different; what works for a high-end eco-tourism park in one country might cause starvation in a fishing village in another.

Governments and big NGOs spend billions of dollars on these protected areas, and if the data behind their social benefits is shaky, researchers say the money being funded to these projects may hurt the very people they claim to help.

The impacts can have ripple effects to the food on our plate. If a marine protected area is poorly designed, it can push local fishers out, potentially making seafood more expensive or less sustainable in the long run by disrupting local food systems.

Singh also said impacted local communities “should have a leadership role in defining what is monitored and measured.” If policies use blanket conservation rules that ignore their rights, it risks kicking people off their ancestral lands in the name of saving nature.

Meanwhile, Cisneros-Montemayor’s study critiques the current model of a blue economy, which often prioritizes wealth over health and equity. His research argues for a total flip in the decision-making process, centering “the people that have always had the least benefits and most costs,” he said.

For a coastal village in the Arctic or an island in the Pacific, being able to generate their own electricity from the wind or sun means they no longer have to wait for a ship to bring expensive fuel. It gives them independence and agency to shift to cleaner energy sources, as the world attempts to transition away from burning fossil fuels.

“We shouldn’t be making decisions that might have very local impacts using very not-local data,” Cisneros-Montemayor said. “Big data is a way to get a general sense of different dynamics, but people making policy choices have to take the time to consider local issues by listening to local people.”

Figure of the week: 20%

That’s how much of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas travel through the Strait of Hormuz, the most critical energy shipping route on the planet. Following joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28, Iran declared the Strait of Hormuz closed. | Source: Wired

On my reading list

Can Nations Agree How to Mine the Sea? This Is the Year, She Says. The New York Times

Ocean Equity Index aims to measure justice at sea, Mongabay

Inside the historic effort to keep the Great Barrier Reef alive, Vox

Iran’s shadow fleet of old tankers a ticking bomb for sea life, say experts, The Guardian

The Colorado River is nearing collapse. It’s Trump’s problem now. Grist

I’m Rachel Ramirez, an independent journalist based in New York City, formerly the climate writer at CNN, where I wrote about climate science, energy, extreme weather, climate solutions and environmental justice. Before that, I’ve written for Vox, Grist, The Guardian, HuffPost, Wired, and so on. I’m currently writing to you from my home island of Saipan in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory just north of Guam. I haven’t been back home since before the COVID-19 pandemic, so it’s nice to be able to breathe in the salty ocean air while writing the very first issue of this newsletter.

Every second breath you take is produced by the ocean. (Well, it comes from tiny floating species called phytoplankton.) If the ocean didn’t absorb the vast majority of planet-warming pollution we’re pumping into the atmosphere, the average surface temperature on land would be a blistering, oven-like heat that could harm each and everyone of us. And if you’re anything like me, I find being near the ocean to be my happy place.

Here at The Confluence, I intend to go beyond science and underscore people’s relationship with the sea, specifically those who have been historically marginalized. In nature, a confluence is the powerful point where two distinct bodies of water merge into one. This newsletter is named for the vital, turbulent intersection where the rigor of ocean science meets the heartbeat of social justice. In most news stories of the ocean, the “what” of it all—the data, the tides, the chemistry—tends to be severed from the “who,” specifically the coastal communities, fishermen, migrant workers, and Indigenous peoples.

We created The Confluence to bridge that divide. We believe that science without justice is exclusionary, producing data that often neglects the human cost of a changing planet. Vice versa, justice without science lacks the foundational truth needed to build lasting solutions for our planet’s waters. Like the ocean, the stories of humans are constantly shifting. We will track the flow of policy, the currents of climate change, and the rising tides of grassroots movements. By linking researchers with activists and fishers with policymakers, we create a current too strong to ignore.

In my years covering the climate crisis within the rigid machinery of corporate media, reporting on the underlying inequities that plague historically marginalized communities was never a priority. We reported on the atmospheric shifts in climate while staying mostly silent on the historic injustices that leave specific communities more vulnerable to the wreckage. Too often, the practice is to parachute into a devastated community, find someone with a powerful anecdote due to deadlines, only to never check back in on that community again until the storm comes back.

In these major networks, the “big story” is often measured by scope and scale—the height of the surge, the category of the storm, another political fallout in D.C., and exclusives—leaving little room for the true human heartbeat of the crisis. With The Confluence, I get to trade the frantic pace of the 24-hour news cycle for the meaningful depth these stories deserve. I’m no longer just reporting on ecological changes; I’m finally able to focus on the people living through it.

The Confluence is supported by Ocean Nexus, an ocean research institute that focuses on establishing social equity at the center of ocean governance. The institute has a network of researchers around the world from South Africa to Panama to Australia, who study the world’s oceans while highlighting systemic inequities.

In this newsletter, I will be featuring the work of scientists and researchers, master navigators and seafarers, marine conservationists, fishermen and so much more. I also hope to hear from you, our reader, throughout this journey.

That said, please don’t forget to subscribe to this newsletter to receive the latest issues in your inbox and follow us on Instagram (at)theconfluence(dot)news.

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