Oceans@Duke Director Stephanie Rousso discusses her personal experience working with women fisherfolk to promote sea turtle conservation in an opinion for Frontiers in Ocean Sustainability. "Globally, women are blending traditional knowledge with modern science, taking on challenges head-on, and redefining what it means to work toward a sustainable ocean," she writes. "While these global initiatives are empowering women at a large scale, my personal journey has shown me how deeply transformative their contributions can be at the grassroots level."

Small-scale fisheries play a significant but overlooked role in global fisheries production and are key to addressing hunger and malnutrition while supporting livelihoods around the world, according to research featured on the cover of Nature. The data and methodology for this paper were produced within the framework of the Illuminating Hidden Harvests initiative conducted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Duke University, and WorldFish.

We provide the first global assessment of the status of preferential access areas (PAAs), a relatively understudied policy tool to govern small-scale fisheries. We find 44 countries, most of them of low or low-middle income, have established a total of 63 PAAs encompassing 3% of continental shelf area worldwide.

Citizen science is a valuable tool for addressing spatial distribution gaps in endangered, migratory species, especially in data-limited regions. This paper examines how diverse community groups (coastal residents, SCUBA divers, and artisanal fishers) contribute to sea turtle distribution information in the Bay of La Paz, Baja California, Mexico. Though the sample size is small, the variety of sources and sighting types highlight the value of collaborative citizen science in complementing traditional research.

The goal of this research is to understand the implications of using nature-based solutions, or natural infrastructure (NI), to mitigate the impacts of flooding. The two solutions I evaluate to supply NI are a program that financially incentivizes its supply by private landowners, and a government-run floodplain property acquisition program. This dissertation consists of three papers examining payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs in terms of enrollment, incentives, and outcomes. 

Global sustainability challenges, such as climate change and the plastics crisis, converge across disciplines and involve diverse stakeholders. Given the magnitude and interconnected nature of sustainability challenges, problem-solvers must be trained across disciplines.

The United States has increasingly relied on government-administered floodplain buyout programs to reduce flood risk and remove flood-damaged dwellings from floodplains. However, high transaction costs and long administrative timelines dramatically hamper buyout program efficiency. This report derives financial efficiency thresholds suggesting situational advantages to both private- and government-run buyout programs and also evaluates alternative institutional structures for implementing buyouts and novel mechanisms for financing buyouts

To make the case for mainstreaming ocean sustainability and add to the existing literature, Citigroup carried out an original analysis consisting of two parts: (1) an assessment of impact materiality and revenue exposure for industries and a (2) geospatial analysis to identify potential hotspots of marine natural capital loss.

John Virdin of the Nicholas Institute was one of the expert contributors to this report.

Ocean conservation and sustainable use cannot be pursued or achieved without consideration of the planetary impacts of climate change, and particularly the role of the oceans in both mitigation and adaptation. For this reason, the international community has increasingly committed to providing aid to help finance public goods for ocean conservation and climate action. Although many organizations have set up mechanisms to track both aid and climate finance, such trackers are usually not focused on financial flows related to ocean conservation and climate action.

This whitepaper summarizes the scientific and policy consensus at the ocean-climate nexus, specifically with respect to the role of coral reefs and closely associated tropical coastal ecosystems in climate change processes, and explicitly identifies gaps within key intergovernmental climate and biodiversity policy frameworks that must be addressed to maximize their potential as nature-based solutions during a key decade of conservation action. It concludes with recommendations for national governments and other stakeholders.