The Sea Around Us MSc student, Anna Luna Rossi (fourth from the left), with her NGO Reserva colleagues and actress Auli’i Cravalho at UNOC 2025.
By Anna Luna Rossi.
June 2025 marked the third edition of the United Nations Ocean Conference, hosted in Nice, France, and co-organized by France and Costa Rica. UNOC3 falls within the Ocean Decade initiative to create a framework for communicating and using ocean knowledge to generate real-time actions for safeguarding our marine resources.
Bluefin tuna. Image by Tom Puchner, Flickr
Extractive activity in international waters – including fishing, seabed mining, and oil and gas exploitation – should be banned forever, according to top scientists.
The high seas, the vast international waters beyond national jurisdiction, cover 43 per cent of the planet’s surface and two-thirds of its living space. Yet they remain largely unprotected and increasingly threatened by overfishing, climate disruption and the rising interest in deep-sea mining.
From left to right: William Cheung, Daniel Pauly and Rashid Sumaila.
The Sea Around Us principal investigator, Dr. Daniel Pauly, and Advisory Board Members, Drs. William Cheung and Rashid Sumaila, have been listed among the most highly cited investigators worldwide in 2024 by Clarivate Analytics.
Hoi An fish market in Vietnam. Image by Jean-Marie Hullot, Flickr.
A recent study by researchers at the Sea Around Us – Indian Ocean, based at the University of Western Australia, the Changing Ocean Research Unit at the University of British Columbia and the University of Miami, shows that even with strong climate mitigation efforts, maximum catch potential is expected to fall by 58–92 per cent in the Pacific Islands and 65–86 per cent in Southeast Asia by the mid to end of the 21st century. These losses will likely result in fisheries failing to meet key micronutrient requirements in these regions’ coastal populations.
The Sea Around Us PI, Dr. Daniel Pauly, and communications officer, Valentina Ruiz-Leotaud, have produced a new Fisheries Centre Research Report titled Marine and Freshwater Miscellanea V.
As its four predecessors, this document presents a diverse range of topics that offer substantial contributions to the field of fisheries science and which, if not published as an FCRR, might have remained stored away in individual researchers’ desks or computers.