Three major ocean cleanup projects have won the United Nations (UN) recognition as World Restoration Flagships, covering nearly five million hectares of damaged marine areas in East Africa, Mexico, and Spain, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reported. The projects are working to fix pollution, overfishing, and invasive species problems across an area about the size of Costa Rica. Winners were announced at the UN Ocean Conference in Nice and can now get UN backing for their restoration work.
Each project tackles different ocean problems but with the same goal of bringing dead or dying waters back to life. The Mozambique Channel effort focuses on saving coral reefs, Mexico is working on more than sixty islands, and Spain’s Mar Menor lagoon became Europe’s first ecosystem to get legal rights like a person. That last one might sound weird, but it gives the lagoon powerful legal protection against damage.
Ocean ecosystems have been getting hammered for decades by climate change, too much fishing, and pollution. Coastal communities are feeling the pain through lost jobs in fishing and tourism. But these restoration projects show it’s possible to turn things around when governments, scientists, and local people work together.
“After decades of using the ocean as a global dump site, we are witnessing a great shift towards restoration,” said Inger Andersen from the UN Environment Programme. The Food and Agriculture Organization’s QU Dongyu said these projects prove that “halting and reversing degradation is not only possible, but also beneficial to planet and people.”
The awards are part of a bigger UN push to restore one billion hectares of damaged ecosystems by 2030. That’s larger than China, which gives you an idea of how much work needs to be done to fix the environmental mess we’ve created in our oceans and on land.
