#fisheries

🇫🇷 France · BLOOM Association

A tiny Paris NGO took on France's industrial fishing lobby with a comic strip, 900,000 signatures and a decade of stubbornness — and got deep-sea trawling outlawed across the EU.

🇺🇸 United States · American Rivers

The US nonprofit behind the country's biggest-ever dam removal, which reopened 400 miles of the Klamath River to salmon in 2024.

🇦🇴 Angola · ACADIR (Associação de Conservação do Ambiente e Desenvolvimento Integrado Rural)

Angola's first locally-led conservation NGO helps communities in Cuando Cubango secure land and resource rights while rebuilding farms, fisheries and wildlife after decades of war.

🇧🇩 Bangladesh · Baragangina Resource Management Organisation

Fishing villages around a north-east Bangladeshi haor agreed to stop fishing 170 hectares of it entirely — and within a few years were catching twenty times more everywhere else.

🇲🇷 Mauritania · BACoMaB Trust Fund (Fonds Fiduciaire du Banc d'Arguin et de la Biodiversité Côtière et Marine)

A Nouakchott-based conservation trust fund permanently finances ranger patrols, science and community programs across Mauritania's marine protected areas.

🇱🇰 Sri Lanka · Blue Resources Trust

Blue Resources Trust conducts marine research in Sri Lanka on sharks, rays, coral reefs, and seagrass to inform conservation policy.

🇲🇬 Madagascar · Blue Ventures

Marine conservation NGO empowering Madagascar's coastal fishing communities to manage and restore their own reefs and fisheries.

🇴🇲 Oman · Environment Society of Oman (ESO)

Oman's only dedicated environmental NGO organizes volunteers to strip abandoned fishing nets and marine debris from the beaches and coral reefs that ring one of the world's most important turtle rookeries.

🇹🇿 Tanzania · Mwambao Coastal Community Network

A Zanzibar-born network puts coastal Tanzanian communities in charge of restoring reefs, mangroves and fisheries on which their livelihoods depend.

🇲🇲 Myanmar · Friends of Wildlife (FOW)

A Yangon-based NGO works with villagers across Myanmar to protect elephants, Eld's deer and freshwater fish through community-run conservation zones and cleaner cookstoves.

🇦🇷 Argentina · Fundación Humedales / Wetlands International LAC

From the Pantanal to the Paraná Delta runs one of the last great river systems on Earth with no dams across it — and a ten-year programme trying to keep it that way.

🌍 Global · Dam Removal Europe

A pan-European coalition that tore down a record 603 obsolete dams, weirs and culverts in 2025 alone to let rivers run wild again.

🇰🇭 Cambodia · Fisheries Action Coalition Team (FACT)

A Phnom Penh-based coalition of Cambodian NGOs helping lakeside communities set up protected fish refuges in the flooded forests of Tonle Sap, Southeast Asia's largest lake.

🇫🇯 Fiji · Fiji Locally Managed Marine Area (FLMMA) Network

FLMMA links hundreds of Fijian villages, NGOs, and government agencies to manage coastal fisheries through customary tabu no-take areas.

🇼🇫 Wallis and Futuna · Faiva Tautai

A handful of worried fishers on Wallis marked out their own no-fishing zone to bring the lagoon's fish back.

🇲🇦 Morocco · AGIR (Association de Gestion Intégrée des Ressources)

A grassroots association co-manages Morocco's only marine national park with local fishers, turning no-take zones into a model for the Mediterranean.

🇲🇽 Mexico · Comunidad y Biodiversidad (COBI)

A Mexican NGO trains small-scale fishers to run their own no-take marine reserves and collect the science that keeps fisheries sustainable.

🇲🇪 Montenegro · NGO Green Home

A Montenegrin NGO that organized local fishermen to help design the country's second marine protected area, then kept the government's dam plans off two of its wildest rivers.

🇬🇱 Greenland · PISUNA

Scientists fly in for a season; hunters have been on the same ice for a lifetime. In Greenland the hunters choose what to monitor and the results go to the ministry.

🇧🇲 Bermuda · Sargasso Sea Commission

A floating golden forest of seaweed the size of the continental United States drifts in the mid-Atlantic, owned by nobody — and Bermuda has spent a decade trying to give it a legal guardian.

🇦🇶 Antarctica · Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition

Almost everything in the Southern Ocean eats krill, or eats something that does — and five countries are now taking all of it.

🌍 Global · Deep Sea Conservation Coalition

The seabed 4,000 metres down grows a centimetre of crust in a million years; this coalition of 140 groups exists to stop it being strip-mined before anyone has finished naming what lives there.

🇿🇦 South Africa · BirdLife South Africa

South Africa's Albatross Task Force trains trawler and longline crews to fit simple bird-scaring lines that have slashed albatross deaths at sea.

🇲🇩 Moldova · Eco-TIRAS International Environmental Association of River Keepers

A coalition of more than fifty Moldovan and Ukrainian river-keeper NGOs works to keep the transboundary Dniester River healthy for the eight million people who depend on it.

🇰🇼 Kuwait · Kuwait Dive Team

A volunteer diving corps that has spent decades hauling ghost nets off Kuwait Bay's coral reefs and mooring boats so anchors stop crushing them.

🇨🇬 Republic of the Congo · Wildlife Conservation Society

Twenty thousand people live inside this flooded forest in the Republic of Congo, and the reserve they co-manage sits on more peat than any other protected area in Central Africa.

🇺🇸 United States · Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana

Shucked oyster shells that used to go to landfill are hauled back to the coast in mesh bags, where they seed new reefs that break the waves eating Louisiana's salt marsh.

🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea · Mahonia Na Dari Conservation and Research Centre

Papua New Guinea's 'Guardian of the Sea' has spent nearly three decades teaching Kimbe Bay communities to run their own no-take marine reserves in the heart of the Coral Triangle.

🇲🇿 Mozambique · Love The Oceans

A grassroots dive-and-research charity in Jangamo Bay is gathering the reef, fisheries and megafauna data needed to win Mozambique's first Marine Protected Area, while training local women as the district's first female scuba divers.

🇵🇹 Portugal · Okeanos — Institute of Marine Sciences, University of the Azores

You cannot protect a seamount nobody has photographed — so an institute on a volcanic island in mid-ocean built a cheap drifting camera and started filming the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

🇲🇭 Marshall Islands · Marshall Islands Conservation Society (MICS)

Marshallese conservationists are blending traditional atoll knowledge with science to put local communities in charge of their own reefs and fisheries.

🇫🇲 Micronesia · Micronesia Conservation Trust (MCT)

The regional trust fund bankrolling the Micronesia Challenge, moving over $100 million to protect coral reefs and forests across five Pacific nations and territories.

🇬🇦 Gabon · Organisation Ecologique des Lacs et de l'Ogooué (OELO)

Residents of a fishing village on Lake Oguemoué formed their own NGO to police bushmeat and overfishing, turning ecotourism income into wetland protection across Gabon's largest Ramsar site.

🇰🇭 Cambodia · Marine Conservation Cambodia

From a small island base in the Kep Archipelago, this community-rooted NGO has spent nearly two decades turning trawled-out seabeds back into thriving fishing grounds.

🌍 Global · Rivers without Boundaries Coalition

A Mongolia-registered coalition fighting a decade-long battle to stop mega-dams on the rivers that feed Lake Baikal.

🇸🇧 Solomon Islands · Solomon Islands Locally Managed Marine Areas Network (SILMMA)

Across the Solomon Islands, villages set their own no-fishing zones and reef rules through a nationwide network of locally managed marine areas.

🌍 Global · Sea Shepherd Conservation Society

Direct-action marine conservation fleet defending ocean wildlife from poaching and illegal fishing worldwide.

🇱🇨 Saint Lucia · Soufrière Marine Management Association (SMMA)

Since 1994 fishers, dive operators and the government have jointly managed Saint Lucia's most valuable reef through a single, zoned marine protected area.

🇨🇷 Costa Rica · MigraMar

Hammerheads swim a 700-kilometre corridor between Cocos and the Galápagos twice a year; the tags proving it turned an invisible migration into a protected route.

🇮🇹 Italy · MedReAct

The Mediterranean has lost 40% of its large predators in sixty years — but close one deep pit to trawlers and the hake, the scampi and even the bottom sharks come back.

🇳🇦 Namibia · Swakopmund Matters

Namibia's cold Benguela upwelling feeds a fishery employing 22,000 people; a proposal to vacuum phosphate off the seabed beneath it has been fought to a standstill for fifteen years.

🇮🇳 India · People United for Better Living in Calcutta (PUBLIC)

Kolkata's sewage is cleaned for free by fishponds its own fisherfolk built — and the only reason those ponds still exist is a public interest case filed in 1992.

🇳🇿 New Zealand · New Zealand Whale and Dolphin Trust

Since 1992 this is the only organisation dedicated to researching New Zealand's critically endangered Māui and Hector's dolphins to guide their protection from fishing nets.

🇳🇺 Niue · Tofia Niue

A tiny raised-coral nation partnered with its own community NGO to put its entire ocean territory under protection.

🌍 Global · The Manta Trust

A global network of researchers photo-IDs and protects manta and devil rays, turning citizen-science sightings into marine protected areas and fishing bans.

🇵🇪 Peru · ProDelphinus

A Lima-based marine biology NGO teaches Peru's small-scale fishers to safely release sea turtles caught in their nets and lines, turning bycatch victims into survivors.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Severn Rivers Trust

A UK river charity that built four fish passes to reopen the River Severn to twaite shad after nearly 180 years of exclusion.

🇹🇴 Tonga · Vava'u Environmental Protection Association (VEPA)

A Tongan NGO founded by local leaders is turning traditional reef knowledge into a nationwide network of community-run ocean management zones.