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Understanding how marine species use the high seas: The Migratory Connectivity in the Ocean (MiCO) system

By Guillermo Ortuño Crespo, Nereus Program Fellow at Duke University

Due to their wide-ranging swimming behaviors, migratory fish, marine mammal, seabird and sea turtle species experience a variety, and an increasing amount, of anthropogenic pressures over the course of their lives. These threats, including climate change, overfishing, and marine pollution, combined with conservation strategies that largely fail to consider spatial connectivity over the life cycle, are resulting in declining populations worldwide.

The UN Oceans Conference and Sustainable Development Goals: Are partnerships providing the way forward?

The global oceans provide hundreds of millions of people with livelihoods, food and nutritional security, and are crucial for employment, economic development, and export earnings in many countries and coastal communities around the world. The status of these important ecosystems and its fisheries resources are however rapidly declining, following decades of unsustainable exploitation patterns, overcapacity, and unsuccessful governance interventions.

Side Event at the UN Ocean Conference Preparatory Meeting

The Nereus Program facilitated a side event on February 16 entitled: “Co-Benefits of Achieving SDG Goal 14 to Wider SDGs: Prioritizing Action Given Climate Change and Social Inequity”. The theme of the event was implications of changing oceans on the advancement of SDG’s, with an emphasis on the co-benefits of achieving ocean targets on other environmental, economic, and social equity goals.

UN Convention on Biological Diversity 2016 (COP13)

This year’s conference focused on mainstreaming biodiversity across relevant sectors, especially agriculture, fisheries, forestry, and tourism, to contribute to the sustainable development goals, climate action, food security and other human development goals. Nereus Program researchers participated in expert workshops and drafting groups, and presented at several side events.

In response to: A Global Estimate of Seafood Consumption by Coastal Indigenous Peoples

Traditionally, Indigenous people have resisted research, especially quantitative research that has fed into the imposition of discriminatory socio-economic and political policies to the detriment of Indigenous communities. However, having access to a global database that quantifies fish consumption specifically by Coastal Indigenous peoples around the world, is a critical contribution to Indigenous struggle on a number of fronts.