Conservation & Environment Archives

US senator warns of warming, plastic threats to world’s oceans and fisheries

May 9, 2025 — U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) took to the Senate floor 7 May to warn his colleagues of the threat the warming climate and plastic pollution poses to the world’s oceans and fisheries.

“In the 10 minutes that it takes me to give this speech, the oceans will absorb 4,000 Hiroshima detonations’ worth of heat,” Whitehouse said. “That is why seawater off the Florida Keys hit jacuzzi temperatures. That is why measuring devices along our coasts show a foot of sea level rise already. That is why fish species are moving about and fisheries are collapsing. That is why the world’s coral reefs are bleaching out – over 80 percent of the world’s reefs hit in the last ocean heating surge caused by fossil fuel.”

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

Gulf of Maine may be impacted by Trump’s offshore oil and gas drilling expansion

May 8, 2025 — As part of the Trump’s administration’s effort to expand fossil fuel production in the United States, the Department of the Interior announced recently that it would accelerate the permitting process for a range of energy sources and seek new oil and gas lease sales in offshore waters, including in the Gulf of Maine.

Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said the permitting changes — which speed up review under the National Environmental Policy and Endangered Species Acts, among others — would cut what is often a multi-year review process down to several weeks.

Environmental groups and Maine lawmakers decried the moves while oil and gas industry representatives celebrated them. Days later, a group of New England Senators, including Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King, introduced legislation to ban offshore drilling in waters throughout New England.

“The waters off Maine’s coast provide a healthy ecosystem for our fisheries and are an integral part of our tourism industry, supporting thousands of jobs and generating billions of dollars in revenue each year,” said Collins in a statement. “Offshore drilling along the coast could impact Mainers of all walks of life for generations.”

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

Scientists warn coral restoration can’t keep pace with global reef collapse

April 30, 2025 — Coral restoration won’t save reefs from global warming, according to a recent study – at least, not the way we’re doing it now.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Helsinki and published earlier this month in Nature Ecology & Evolution, finds coral degradation is significantly outpacing restoration efforts. Its results indicate most unsuccessful projects fail due to prohibitive costs, lack of global coordination, location unsuitability, and bleaching events caused by rising water temperatures, during which coral becomes white due to stress.

Despite “public perception and scientific enthusiasm” for coral restoration, we can’t restore our way out of this one, the study finds.

“Scaling up restoration to any meaningful level going beyond the very local scale would be extremely challenging,” senior author Giovanni Strona, now a quantitative ecologist at the European Commission in Italy, told Mongabay.

Sebastian Ferse, a senior ecosystem scientist at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research in Germany, who wasn’t involved with the study, told Mongabay that its results suggest “reef restoration is prohibitively expensive, particularly when looking at the scale of the problem we are facing.”

“It is much more cost-efficient to prevent degradation of reefs in the first place than having to restore the damage afterwards,” Ferse said.

Read the full story at Mongabay

Oil companies have downplayed extent of spills in Gulf of Mexico, investigation finds

April 29, 2025 — One morning in early April 2024, Elías Naal Hernández set out with his fishing net to try his luck in the waters of Isla Aguada, off the coast of southeastern Mexico. The town sits between the Gulf of Mexico and the Laguna de Términos, the country’s largest coastal lagoon. Until he arrived, the fisherman could not begin to imagine the devastating scene he would face that morning at the sea.

“It was an enormous slick: miles and miles of oil. We would catch it in water buckets and they would fill up because of how much there was,” said Hernández. The only thing he caught that day — by the bucketful — was oil.

The spill was also detected via satellite imagery by scientists who have spent years studying oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. Their satellite images show evidence of potential oil slicks beginning March 7, 2024. The oil slicks appeared to originate near infrastructure owned by Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), a Mexican state-owned company responsible for extracting oil from the Gulf of Mexico. Pemex provides 80% of the nation’s crude oil.

Although Pemex was legally required to report the oil spill, the company did not do so. Naal Hernández said that when he went public with the spill, Pemex downplayed the event, arguing that it was a natural release of oil. This response is heard all too often by fishers who report spills, which, according to Naal Hernández, do not have the characteristics of a natural event.

When Naal Hernández started fishing 38 years ago, it was typical for sierra fish, wahoo (Acanthocybium solandri), blackspot seabream (Pagellus bogaraveo), hake, red snapper (Lutjanus campechanus), tuna, tilapia and catfish to swim very close to the coast. Some 300 aquatic species live in the estuary and almost 80 of them are now endangered, according to Mexico’s National Institute of Ecology. For decades, fishing nets would occasionally fill with pink shrimp. Fishers could see bottlenose dolphins, loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) and the critically endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtle (Lepidochelys kempii).

Read the full story at Mongabay

Could planned federal funding cuts jeopardize Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay restoration plans?

April 28, 2025 — The Trump administration’s plans to propose budget cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) could jeopardize efforts to restore the health of Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, according to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF).

According to the CBF, the administration’s potential budget cuts would slash NOAA’s total budget by $1.7 billion, from $6.1 billion to $4.5 billion. It would also reduce funding for the National Marine Fisheries Service by approximately 30 percent.

How would the cuts affect the Chesapeake Bay?

The proposed budget plan would significantly reduce NOAA’s financial support and scientific leadership for Chesapeake Bay restoration efforts.

Under the plan, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), which currently operates with a budget of $1.1 billion, would be reduced to $789.3 million in fiscal year 2026 under the planned budget.

The NMFS houses NOAA’s Chesapeake Bay Office, which leads science initiatives across the region and works closely with the EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program on restoration efforts, according to the CBF.

Read the full story at CBS News

Responsible Fishery Management standard evolves into new global seafood certification program

April 27, 2025 — The Responsible Fisheries Management (RFM) seafood certification standard is being rolled into a new global standard dubbed Certified Seafood International (CSI).

The move marks the latest evolution of the RFM program, which was originally geared toward certifying Alaska’s fisheries as sustainable. Created in 2010, the program was transferred to the nonprofit Certified Seafood Collaborative in 2020 at the same time as it expanded its scope to cover fisheries across North America.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

New study paints gloomy picture of climate change’s impact on commercial fishing

April 22, 2025 — A new study of some of California’s most commercially significant aquatic species paints a grim picture for the future of the state’s fishing industry under the growing threat of climate change.

The study, compiled by a host of researchers including federal and state scientists as well as researchers from UC Santa Cruz and UC Davis, looked at 34 aquatic species in an attempt to gauge how each would fare under predicted climate change scenarios.

Among the species studied were Dungeness crab, red abalone, Pacific herring, Pismo clams, pink shrimp, Pacific bonito and California spiny lobster. The group ranked each by their level of vulnerability to changing environmental conditions.

“The most striking thing that we found is that among the species that were ranked as the most highly vulnerable happened to also be some of California’s economically valuable and culturally important species,” said Mikaela Provost, assistant professor of fisheries ecology at UC Davis and co-author of the study.

California’s oceans are highly productive due to seasonal upwelling which keeps water temperatures cool and filled with nutrients. But models of future conditions forecast disruption through rising temperatures, deoxygenation and potential changes in circulation.

Read the full story at NBC Bay Area

15 years after the BP oil spill disaster, how is the Gulf of Mexico faring?

April 22, 2025 — Down past New Orleans lies Plaquemines parish, a narrow sliver of land at the tip of Louisiana that reaches southward like a finger pointing into the Gulf of Mexico. Past barbecue joints, a naval base, Baptist churches, white egrets, blue herons, and signs advertising items FOR SALE (live shrimp, empty lots and crawfish), Captain Kindra Arnesen lives with her husband and dog in a tidy brick house that smells like eucalyptus potpourri and home cooking.

“There’s nothing I’d rather be doing than be out on the water fishing, especially offshore. I like to get high up on the boat and look out over the water as far as I can see,” Arnesen told Mongabay while stirring a pot of beans. She has worked small commercial fishing boats out in the gulf for decades. “The only thing I love more is my grandbaby.”

“Before the spill, you could ride out there and everywhere you rode there were bait balls of bonita, blue runners, thread herrings, spinners jumping through them. Everywhere you went it was just a sight,” Arnesen recounted, referring to plentiful schools of small fish and spinner dolphins in the open ocean. “After the spill you could ride a hundred miles and not see a bait ball … It slowly died.”

April 20, 2025, marked the 15th anniversary of what is known as the Deepwater Horizon disaster, when an oil rig operated by BP Exploration & Production exploded and sank in the Macondo prospect, 66 kilometers (41 miles) off the Louisiana coast.

Read the full story at Mongabay

US proposes looser interpretation of law that protects threatened species

April 17, 2025 — The Trump administration on Wednesday proposed a major change to how threatened species are considered in agency actions by removing regulatory language that seeks to prevent their habitats from being degraded.

The move was aligned with President Donald Trump’s pledge to unwind what he says are burdensome federal regulations for businesses.

The Endangered Species Act is a key regulatory consideration for agencies when considering whether to grant permits for oil and gas, mining, electric transmission and other operations on federal lands and water. Under federal law, agencies are required to evaluate the environmental impact of proposed industry operations that could threaten endangered species.

In a regulatory notice, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service, divisions of the Departments of Interior and Commerce, proposed to rescind the definition of “harm” included in their ESA regulations.

Read the full story at Reuters

Revitalizing the Gulf: Highlights from 15 Years of Restoration

April 16, 2025 — The Deepwater Horizon oil spill began on April 20, 2010, and resulted in impacts to habitats, natural resources, and communities across the Gulf of America (formerly Gulf of Mexico). Since then, NOAA has taken the lead on more than 60 large-scale projects to restore natural resources. We work with state and local partners, coastal communities, user groups, and other constituents. Below, we’ll highlight key projects that demonstrate the ways we have made progress towards recovery.

Early Restoration

Restoration work across the Gulf began even as damage assessment was ongoing with a large-scale project to restore part of a barrier chain in an area most severely impacted by the spill.

We worked alongside the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority to design and construct the Chenier Ronquille Barrier Island Restoration Project. It improved shoreline stability, restored critical dune features, and created a strong backbarrier marsh platform to support island longevity. The project placed 1.3 million cubic yards of beach and marsh fill designed to prevent island breaching over the 20-year project life. Ongoing monitoring shows that despite severe storm events, the island’s shoreline is intact without new tidal passes. It contributes to coastal protection and restoration in the region.

NOAA also partnered with state Trustees to implement other projects to restore marine resources during the early restoration phase and some of this work continues today. We are:

Building protective living shorelines in Florida, Mississippi, and Alabama
Improving our capacity to respond to stranded sea turtles
Increasing outreach and engagement with shrimp fishing communities to reduce harmful interactions between turtles and trawling gear

We work with state and local partners, coastal communities, user groups and other constituents

Read the full article at NOAA Fisheries