#marine-protection

🇦🇺 Australia · Sharks And Rays Australia

Walkers with dogs, drone pilots and boaters have become sawfish scientists, and their photos have turned up sawfish in Mackay and Moreton Bay, where populations were thought to have vanished.

🇪🇸 Spain · Angel Shark Project: Canary Islands

Critically endangered angelsharks lie buried in Canary Islands sand, and in February 2025 divers found more than 60 of them together off Fuerteventura, the largest gathering ever recorded.

🇻🇮 United States Virgin Islands · Friends of Virgin Islands National Park

Volunteers walk St. John's beaches from summer into winter to guard turtle nests, and in 2025 they saw a record 3,597 hatchlings into the sea.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · The Seahorse Trust

Instead of dragging anchors through the seagrass where spiny seahorses live, Studland Bay boats now clip onto moorings whose screw anchors leave a footprint of just 16 cm.

🇫🇷 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.

🇵🇭 Philippines · Project Seahorse

Seahorse photos uploaded by ordinary divers revealed a Philippine hot spot, and local communities answered by creating a new marine protected area.

🇵🇷 Puerto Rico · Centro de Conservación de Manatíes del Caribe

On the Bayamón campus of Inter American University, three ozone-treated freshwater tanks hold orphaned West Indian manatee calves, and two Florida manatees raise them as surrogate parents before release.

🇲🇿 Mozambique · ParCo (Associação dos Parceiros Comunitários)

In Mangalisse village dried seahorses were once called diamonds and children skipped school to catch them; now the same fishers take tourists out on dhows to snorkel with them.

🇬🇷 Greece · MOm, Hellenic Society for the Study and Protection of the Monk Seal

On 20 October 2026, a week-old orphaned monk seal pup found on a Kythira beach was ferried to Piraeus and onto MOm's 24-hour rehab unit, part of a recovery that produced a 40-year record of births in 2025.

🇨🇦 Canada · Whale Sanctuary Project

A nonprofit is building North America's first seaside sanctuary for retired captive whales in a netted bay in Nova Scotia, Canada.

🇹🇨 Turks and Caicos Islands · Turks & Caicos Islands Whale Project

One humpback nicknamed Pinball has been photographed on the Turks Bank in ten seasons between 2007 and 2026, and a whale-watch boat plus visitors' phone photos built the catalogue that proved it.

🇸🇨 Seychelles · Seychelles Islands Foundation

Aldabra's reefs have been studied for half a century, but nobody had ever looked over the edge into the deep water the atoll sits on — until submersibles went down in 2019.

🇦🇮 Anguilla · Anguilla National Trust

A baited-camera survey added four shark species to Anguilla's list, including the rarely seen Atlantic sixgill, and now the island's National Trust is tagging reef sharks to see whether its marine parks really shelter them.

🇦🇬 Antigua and Barbuda · AnuBlue

A local nonprofit is regrowing Antigua and Barbuda's coral reefs from four underwater nurseries, one fragment at a time.

🇧🇸 Bahamas · Bahamas Marine Mammal Research Organisation (BMMRO)

A Bahamian research team has spent more than three decades tracking whales and dolphins by small boat, building the only long-term record of marine mammal life in Bahamian waters.

🇧🇸 Bahamas · Bahamas Reef Environment Educational Foundation (BREEF)

For over 30 years this Bahamian foundation has been growing coral nurseries and turning thousands of schoolkids into reef defenders.

🇲🇷 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.

🇺🇸 United States · Black Girls Dive Foundation

A Maryland-founded nonprofit certifies Black middle and high school girls as scuba divers and trains them as marine science and conservation leaders.

🇱🇰 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.

🇭🇷 Croatia · Blue World Institute

A Croatian marine research institute whose 30-plus-year dolphin study won the Mediterranean's first bottlenose dolphin reserve and has hosted over 100,000 visitors at its island education centre.

🇸🇭 Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha · St Helena National Trust

In the middle of the South Atlantic, a tiny island trust has photo-identified more than 360 whale sharks, and the mature males and females turn up in near-equal numbers, which no other known aggregation does.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Projeto Meros do Brasil (Instituto Meros do Brasil)

Divers and beachgoers who spot a giant 'mero' can report it with #ContaPraGente, and the photos have let researchers tell 256 individual groupers apart along Brazil's coast.

🇳🇨 New Caledonia · Association Bwärä Tortues Marines

A Bourail community association turns volunteer beach patrols into round-the-clock protection for the South Pacific's second-largest loggerhead turtle nesting site.

🇧🇧 Barbados · Coral Reef Restoration Alliance (CORALL)

A volunteer-run alliance of Barbadian divers, fishers and residents grows coral fragments in nurseries and transplants them onto the island's degraded west coast reefs.

🇩🇪 Germany · German Ocean Foundation (Deutsche Meeresstiftung)

Germany's leading ocean foundation sends teenage researchers to sea and has connected over 62 million people with ocean science since 2021.

🇴🇲 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.

🇬🇼 Guinea-Bissau · Tiniguena (Esta Terra É Nossa)

Guinea-Bissau's oldest conservation NGO helped Bijagós islanders create West Africa's first community-run marine protected area and still co-manages it with them.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · Coral Catch (Yayasan Gili Matra Bersama)

Indonesia's first all-female coral restoration program trains young local women as reef scientists and divers on the Gili Islands.

🇵🇫 French Polynesia · Coral Gardeners

Reef restoration collective from Mo'orea planting climate-resilient corals across French Polynesia and beyond.

🇵🇼 Palau · Coral Reef Research Foundation (CRRF)

Palau's dugong population may be the most isolated on Earth, and a Koror-based research foundation is flying drones over seagrass beds to keep it from vanishing.

🇺🇸 United States · Coral Restoration Foundation

The world's largest reef restoration organization, returning hundreds of thousands of nursery-grown corals to Florida's reefs.

🇨🇱 Chile · Sphenisco e.V.

A German-founded conservation group backs Chilean and Peruvian rescue centres, colony censuses and fishing communities working to save the Humboldt penguin from extinction.

🇫🇴 Faroe Islands · Faroe Marine Research Institute (Havstovan)

The Faroe Islands hold around half a million breeding puffin pairs, and the national marine institute has been watching their burrows since 2005 to find out why the colonies kept emptying.

🇬🇵 Guadeloupe · Kap Natirel

Fishers, divers, swimmers and kayakers across the French Antilles report every shark and ray they meet to ReGuaR, a citizen network that has turned scattered sightings into a species list.

🇦🇼 Aruba · Turtugaruba Foundation

Every March to December a crew of volunteers walks Aruba's beaches at first light to find and fence nests of four endangered sea turtle species, because only about 1 in 1,000 hatchlings reaches adulthood.

🇦🇺 Australia · Dhimurru Aboriginal Corporation

Yolŋu Traditional Owners founded Dhimurru to manage Australia's first jointly declared land and sea Indigenous Protected Area across northeast Arnhem Land.

🇬🇶 Equatorial Guinea · African Marine Conservation Organisation (AMCO)

Atlantic humpback dolphins have no idea where Cameroon ends and Equatorial Guinea begins, so a new four-year EU-funded project is managing two national parks on either side of the line as one coastline.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Dyer Island Conservation Trust

Off Gansbaai's shark-rich waters, researchers tag great whites while rehabbers hand-raise stranded African penguin chicks for a colony fighting collapse.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Empatheatre

A KwaZulu-Natal theatre collective turns months of interviews with fishers, mining-affected families and marine scientists into immersive plays that put ocean governance decisions in front of the very communities they affect.

🇦🇺 Australia · Erub Arts

On a tiny Torres Strait island, Indigenous artists weave thousands of abandoned fishing nets into internationally exhibited sculptures that fight ocean plastic and keep sea culture alive.

🇫🇯 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.

🇺🇸 United States · FORCE BLUE

Retired Special Operations veterans trade combat missions for coral restoration dives, finding a new sense of purpose while helping rebuild America's reefs.

🇮🇪 Ireland · Fair Seas

A coalition of Ireland's leading ocean NGOs is pushing to grow Irish marine protection from under 10% to 30% by 2030.

🇼🇫 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.

🇳🇦 Namibia · Kelp Blue

Kelp Blue is cultivating vast offshore giant-kelp forests off Namibia's coast to lock carbon away in the deep ocean while rebuilding marine biodiversity.

🇹🇫 French Southern and Antarctic Lands · Réserve naturelle nationale des Terres australes françaises

On one island in the southern Indian Ocean lives an albatross found nowhere else on the planet — about 180 birds, and thirty breeding pairs a year.

🇦🇸 American Samoa · Finafinau

American Samoa's only youth-led environmental nonprofit turned 150 teenagers loose on a single beach and hauled out 4,000 pieces of trash.

🇲🇦 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.

🇬🇮 Gibraltar · The Nautilus Project

A charity that began as a marine biologist giving lunchtime talks in Gibraltar schools now has students logging sightings of 39 species and pulling invasive algae off the Rock.

🇪🇸 Spain · Gravity Wave

A Spanish startup paying thousands of traditional fishers to haul plastic and abandoned nets out of the Mediterranean.

🇸🇷 Suriname · Green Heritage Fund Suriname

A Paramaribo nonprofit built Suriname's only wildlife hospital for sloths, anteaters and armadillos while tracking the country's threatened river dolphins.

🇲🇪 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.

🇰🇾 Cayman Islands · Reef Environmental Education Foundation (REEF)

Every winter full moon, nearly 10,000 endangered Nassau grouper converge on one spot off Little Cayman to spawn, and in 2025 they did not show up as expected for the first time since scientists started counting.

🇲🇻 Maldives · Reefscapers (Seamarc)

Marine biologists in the Maldives have hand-planted thousands of steel coral frames to help rebuild reefs bleached by warming seas.

🇨🇺 Cuba · Ocean Doctor

A no-take marine reserve off Cuba's south coast now holds up to ten times more sharks and fish than the surrounding sea.

🇬🇷 Greece · ARCHELON, the Sea Turtle Protection Society of Greece

For over four decades, volunteers have walked Greece's beaches every summer night to protect the Mediterranean's largest loggerhead turtle nesting population.

🇹🇳 Tunisia · Notre Grand Bleu

A Monastir-based association rescues stranded sea turtles and guards their nesting beaches along Tunisia's Mediterranean coast.

🇹🇹 Trinidad and Tobago · Nature Seekers

A village conservation group founded in 1990 turned Matura Beach from a poaching hotspot into a stronghold protecting half of Trinidad's nesting leatherback turtles.

🇨🇾 Cyprus · Society for the Protection of Turtles (SPOT)

Volunteers formed in the 1980s now screen thousands of green and loggerhead turtle nests a season on North Cyprus's beaches, turning a near-silent coastline into one of the Mediterranean's nesting strongholds.

🇻🇪 Venezuela · Provita (Asociacion Civil Provita)

Venezuela's oldest conservation NGO protects one of the country's most important hawksbill turtle nesting beaches, turning former egg poachers into nest guardians in the remote fishing village of Macuro.

🇨🇴 Colombia · Fundación Malpelo y Otros Ecosistemas Marinos

A Colombian NGO leads science and surveillance for Malpelo, a remote Pacific island sanctuary that hosts hundreds of migratory hammerhead sharks.

🇧🇲 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.

🇴🇲 Oman · Environment Authority – Oman

Oman's Environment Authority runs round-the-clock beach patrols on Masirah Island, home to one of the world's largest loggerhead turtle nesting populations.

🇪🇬 Egypt · Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Association (HEPCA)

Founded by Hurghada divers in 1992, HEPCA runs the world's largest reef-mooring network and the waste systems that keep the Red Sea's coral coast alive.

🌍 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.

🇭🇰 Hong Kong · Ocean Park Conservation Foundation, Hong Kong

Horseshoe crabs are older than the dinosaurs and Hong Kong lost over 90% of its wild ones in seven years, so schoolchildren began hand-raising juveniles for release and volunteers now count them on 17 mudflats.

🇺🇾 Uruguay · Karumbé

Uruguay's only dedicated sea turtle NGO runs two rehabilitation centers on the Atlantic coast where stranded, plastic-choked and cold-stunned turtles get a second chance.

🇬🇫 French Guiana · Association Kwata

Where leatherback nests are lost to the sea in western French Guiana, Kwata moves them into a natural hatchery on the beach, 40 nests and 1,155 released hatchlings in 2025.

🇿🇦 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.

🇹🇷 Türkiye · TURMEPA (DenizTemiz Derneği / Turkish Marine Environment Protection Association)

Turkey's first marine conservation NGO runs a fleet of waste-collection boats and has taken ocean education to millions of students nationwide.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Coastal and Marine Resource Development (COMRED)

At Munje on Kenya's south coast, a 40-hectare patch of reef is left alone for months, then opened for a few days so women can gather octopus that have grown fat.

🇦🇴 Angola · Fundação Kissama

A Luanda-based conservation foundation and university biologists have turned former turtle hunters into nest guardians along Angola's coast.

🇹🇱 Timor-Leste · Konservasaun Flora no Fauna (KFF)

Founded by biology students in Dili, Timor-Leste's only dedicated conservation NGO has rebuilt tens of hectares of mangrove coastline stripped bare by charcoal-cutting.

🇰🇼 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.

🇵🇭 Philippines · Large Marine Vertebrates Research Institute Philippines (LAMAVE)

LAMAVE is a Philippine non-profit researching and protecting whale sharks, manta rays, turtles, and other marine megafauna nationwide.

🇲🇸 Montserrat · Island Solutions

Montserrat had almost no data on the whales passing its coast, so a small local nonprofit strung hydrophones across three quarters of its waters and now points them at sperm whales in the deep.

🇲🇶 Martinique · Caribbean Cetacean Society

A Martinique-based team of marine biologists sails the Lesser Antilles with hydrophones and cameras so that islands with no whale scientists of their own can finally protect their cetaceans.

🇺🇸 United States · Schmidt Ocean Institute

Ship time on a deep-sea research vessel costs tens of thousands a day, which is why most of the seafloor is unexplored — so this institute gives it away and puts every dive on YouTube.

🇺🇸 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.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Mouse-Free Marion

House mice reached Marion Island with sealers, ran out of insects, and learned to eat seabird chicks alive in their nests. The chicks, having evolved without predators, do not move.

🇫🇲 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.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Association for Coastal Ecosystem Services (ACES)

The world's first blue carbon project pays a Kenyan fishing community to protect and replant the mangroves of Gazi Bay.

🇫🇷 France · Surfrider Foundation Europe

Founded by surfers in Biarritz in 1990, this network now organizes thousands of volunteer cleanups on beaches, riverbanks and seabeds across Europe every year.

🇬🇭 Ghana · AquaLife Conservancy

In five fishing towns of Ghana's Ahanta West district, fishers once paid by the fin are now trained to release critically endangered guitarfish, and some earn more from snail farms and soap than from the sea.

🇮🇸 Iceland · SEA LIFE Trust Beluga Whale Sanctuary (Puffling Patrol partner)

Fledgling puffins get lured off course by the lights of Heimaey town, so residents and volunteers collect them at night and release them at sea.

🇳🇦 Namibia · NAMCOB (Namibian Foundation for the Conservation of Seabirds)

From a tiny office in the port of Luderitz, Namibia's only dedicated seabird charity runs a 24/7 oil-spill response line for penguins, Cape gannets and bank cormorants whose colonies are shrinking fast.

🇲🇻 Maldives · Maldives Whale Shark Research Programme

A Maldivian charity that photo-identifies individual whale sharks by their spot patterns to protect the only year-round aggregation site of its kind on Earth.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Nekton

Roughly a tenth of ocean life has ever been described, and the naming has historically taken over a decade per species — so this Oxford outfit built a production line for discovery.

🇧🇯 Benin · Nature Tropicale ONG

Benin's first IUCN-member NGO patrols the coast to rescue sea turtles, manatees and dolphins while running the country's first two marine protected areas.

🇨🇦 Canada · Ocean Legacy Foundation

Recovers marine plastic and ghost gear from Canada's coasts and recycles it into new material.

🇬🇩 Grenada · Ocean Spirits Inc.

Since 1999 this Grenadian NGO has run the Caribbean's longest continuous leatherback turtle survey and driven beach egg poaching down to almost nothing.

🌍 Global · Oceana

The largest international advocacy organization focused solely on winning policy victories to protect the world's oceans.

🇮🇹 Italy · Ogyre

Italy's first 'fishing for litter' platform, paying fishermen to bring back the marine waste they haul up in their nets.

🇺🇸 United States · One Ocean Conservation

Free-diving alongside wild sharks off Oahu's North Shore, marine biologist Ocean Ramsey's team turns every encounter into photo-ID research and the advocacy that outlawed shark killing in Hawaii.

🇦🇺 Australia · Operation Crayweed (UNSW Sydney / Sydney Institute of Marine Science)

Scientists and volunteers are replanting Sydney's lost underwater crayweed forests, reef by reef.

🇵🇼 Palau · Palau International Coral Reef Center

Palau closed 80 percent of its ocean territory to all fishing and extraction, creating one of the largest and strictest fully protected marine reserves on Earth.

🇵🇼 Palau · Ebiil Society

In Palau, where sea cucumbers are a women's fishery, local women now raise sandfish seed and farm giant clams instead of stripping the reef.

🇳🇮 Nicaragua · Paso Pacifico

Former egg poachers turned community rangers now patrol Nicaragua's Pacific beaches every night to save critically endangered sea turtles.

🇰🇳 Saint Kitts and Nevis · St. Kitts Sea Turtle Monitoring Network

A community-based network of night patrollers has tagged hundreds of nesting leatherback turtles on St. Kitts' beaches since 2003, turning volunteer beach walks into a 13-year scientific record.

🇨🇻 Cape Verde · Project Biodiversity (Projeto Biodiversidade)

Every summer night on Sal Island, this Cabo Verdean NGO's patrols protect the world's third-largest loggerhead turtle nesting population from poachers and predators.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Project Seagrass

The world's leading seagrass conservation charity, replanting millions of seeds to bring the UK's lost underwater meadows back to life.

🇸🇬 Singapore · Ocean Purpose Project

Singapore's first Blue Economy social enterprise runs monthly community beach cleanups at Pasir Ris and turns the collected ocean plastic into fuel and hydrogen.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Fundação Pró-TAMAR

A national network of beach stations that turned Brazil's five sea turtle species from bycatch statistics into a 40-million-strong conservation success story.

🇭🇳 Honduras · Roatan Marine Park

A community-founded patrol and restoration crew guards the reefs of Roatan and the rest of Honduras's largest marine protected area.

🇰🇭 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.

🇯🇲 Jamaica · Alligator Head Foundation

A Jamaican marine NGO nurses staghorn and elkhorn coral in underwater nurseries and guards the fish sanctuary that revived Oracabessa Bay.

🇳🇱 Netherlands · Stichting De Noordzee (North Sea Foundation)

For more than four decades this Dutch foundation has fought for a cleaner, wilder North Sea — and is now turning offshore wind farms into oyster reefs.

🇵🇦 Panama · Mother of Corals

Scientists and dive communities in Bocas del Toro are hand-building artificial reef structures to bring Panama's Caribbean coral back from the brink.

🇲🇾 Malaysia · Reef Check Malaysia

Trains volunteer divers and island communities to survey, restore, and defend Malaysia's coral reefs.

🇲🇺 Mauritius · Reef Conservation

A Mauritian NGO restoring coral reefs, laying eco-friendly mooring buoys and turning the island's schools into a nationwide network of ocean stewards.

🇸🇨 Seychelles · Nature Seychelles

Divers at Cousin Island Special Reserve have grown and transplanted over 32,000 coral fragments to fully revive a hectare of bleached reef.

🇵🇰 Pakistan · WWF-Pakistan

Coastal communities and WWF-Pakistan have replanted tens of thousands of hectares of mangroves that shield the Indus Delta from cyclones and rising seas.

🌍 Global · Sustainable Surf (SeaTrees)

SeaTrees, the flagship program of nonprofit Sustainable Surf, funds local partners around the world to plant and protect mangroves, kelp and seagrass meadows that store carbon far faster than land forests.

🇮🇪 Ireland · Seal Rescue Ireland

The Republic of Ireland's only seal rehabilitation centre nurses sick, injured and orphaned seal pups back to health and returns them to the wild.

🇺🇸 United States · Save the Manatee Club

Co-founded by Jimmy Buffett in 1981, this Florida nonprofit funds manatee rescue, rehabilitation and the Adopt-A-Manatee programme that has made the species a global conservation icon.

🇦🇺 Australia · Resilient Reefs Foundation

Volunteer divers grow coral fragments on offshore nurseries near Cairns and replant them onto Great Barrier Reef sections damaged by bleaching and cyclones.

🇧🇿 Belize · Fragments of Hope

A Placencia-based coral nursery network has replanted tens of thousands of resilient corals along the Belize Barrier Reef since 2006.

🇦🇪 United Arab Emirates · Emirates Nature-WWF

The UAE's first WWF affiliate is replanting the Northern Emirates' coastline with mangroves that store four times more carbon than tropical forest.

🇻🇨 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines · Richmond Vale Academy

A volunteer training school on St. Vincent is rebuilding storm- and disease-battered reefs one hand-planted coral fragment at a time.

🇷🇪 Réunion · Globice Réunion

Every humpback has a one-of-a-kind tail, and Globice's volunteers photographed 1,156 different ones off Réunion in 2023, a record that pushed its catalogue past 3,200 whales.

🇸🇧 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 · Sailors for the Sea Powered by Oceana

Since 2004, Sailors for the Sea has turned sailing regattas into environmental testing grounds, certifying events worldwide through Clean Regattas -- the sport's leading sustainability standard -- to keep plastic and pollution out of the water sailors race on.

🌍 Global · Sea Shepherd Conservation Society

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

🇨🇷 Costa Rica · Sea Turtle Conservancy

The world's oldest sea turtle conservation group, safeguarding turtles from its historic Tortuguero research station.

🌍 Global · SeaLegacy

Co-founded by conservation photographers Cristina Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen, this collective sends filmmakers and photographers to the world's most threatened seas to turn what they capture into campaigns that stop drilling, protect sharks and expand marine reserves.

🇲🇹 Malta · Sharklab-Malta

Sharklab-Malta rescues shark eggs left orphaned by fishing, hatches the pups in captivity, and releases them back into the Mediterranean.

🇸🇽 Sint Maarten · Nature Foundation Sint Maarten

Tiger sharks, Caribbean reef sharks and spotted eagle rays are born in Sint Maarten's lagoon, and the island's Nature Foundation is paying fishers to help keep them alive.

🇱🇨 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.

🇳🇴 Norway · WWF-Norway

Norway voted to open an area of Arctic seabed larger than Britain to mining; one lawsuit and two budget negotiations later, no licence will be issued before 2029.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · Sungai Watch

Bali-born environmental organization stopping river plastic from reaching the ocean with simple floating barriers and daily cleanups.

🇳🇿 New Zealand · Kiwis Against Seabed Mining

A plan to suck 50 million tonnes of seabed a year off the Taranaki coast met a volunteer coalition of surfers, fishers and iwi — who took it to the Supreme Court and won.

🇻🇬 British Virgin Islands · Association of Reef Keepers

In the British Virgin Islands, twenty years of tagging data show hawksbill turtles declining while greens increase, in a place where fishers and scientists still argue over which story is true.

🇨🇷 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.

🇹🇿 Tanzania · Action for Ocean (AFO)

Where Kilwa villagers fence off their octopus reefs for a few months, the average octopus has grown from 500 g to 975 g.

🇨🇰 Cook Islands · Te Ipukarea Society (TIS)

The Cook Islands' longest-running environmental watchdog pairs traditional raui reef closures with modern science to defend a 1.9-million-square-kilometre ocean nation.

🇵🇫 French Polynesia · Te Mana O Te Moana

A Moorea-based clinic has nursed hundreds of injured sea turtles back to health and taught tens of thousands of Polynesian schoolchildren to protect the ocean.

🇨🇼 Curaçao · Caribbean Cetacean Society

A Curaçao-raised scientist has led three straight years of dolphin and whale surveys around the ABC islands, and Curaçao announced a marine reserve while the latest one was still at sea.

🇹🇭 Thailand · Care for Coral

Two Thai sisters turned a high-school coral-planting project into the country's first youth-led coral restoration nonprofit, taking volunteers underwater to grow reefs from Phuket to Koh Tao.

🇨🇱 Chile · ESMOI — Millennium Nucleus for Ecology and Sustainable Management of Oceanic Islands

More than 200 underwater mountains run from the Chilean coast out to Rapa Nui, carrying species found nowhere else — and three-quarters of the chain sits in international waters with no protection at all.

🇮🇹 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.

🇪🇸 Spain · ILP Mar Menor

After nitrate runoff turned Europe's largest saltwater lagoon into green soup and washed dead fish onto the beaches, ordinary Murcians collected 640,000 signatures to give the water its own rights.

🇵🇭 Philippines · Malampaya Foundation

The Philippines' native giant clam was written off as extinct in the 1980s, until a hatchery in Palawan found survivors, spawned 132 million of them, and started planting them back on protected reefs.

🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea · Alliance of Solwara Warriors

Papua New Guinea granted the world's first deep-sea mining licence in its own Bismarck Sea; the coastal clans who fish those waters spent eight years making the project unfinanceable.

🇳🇦 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.

🇳🇱 Netherlands · The Great Bubble Barrier

Dutch company using curtains of bubbles to stop plastic in rivers and canals without blocking boats or wildlife.

🇾🇹 Mayotte · Ceta'Maore

Mayotte holds nearly a quarter of the world's marine mammal diversity, including fewer than ten surviving dugongs, and a young volunteer group is now counting every one.

🇿🇦 South Africa · The Litterboom Project NPC

Since 2017, floating booms across KwaZulu-Natal and Western Cape rivers have intercepted more than 2.5 million kilograms of plastic before it reaches the sea.

🇨🇳 China · Spoon-billed Sandpiper in China

A tiny Shanghai nonprofit counted birds on a Jiangsu mudflat until the numbers were undeniable — and the reclamation machines stopped.

🌍 Global · The Ocean Cleanup

Dutch nonprofit deploying ocean systems and river Interceptors to rid the world's oceans of plastic.

🇳🇿 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.

🇲🇨 Monaco · Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation

A foundation in the world's second-smallest country bankrolled the protected area around the Greek island of Gyaros, where the world's rarest seal colony grew to 87 animals, then built a donor coalition to copy it across the Mediterranean.

🇫🇯 Fiji · Pacific Network on Globalisation

Mining companies court Pacific governments one at a time; this small Suva outfit does the unglamorous work of making sure the region negotiates as a bloc instead.

🌍 Global · High Seas Alliance

Two-thirds of the ocean belongs to no one, and until this year almost none of it could legally be protected — a coalition of 70 groups spent a decade changing that.

🇫🇰 Falkland Islands · Falklands Conservation

Going back to the same cliffs every year for three and a half decades is how you find out that an albatross is no longer endangered.

🇳🇺 Niue · Tofia Niue

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

🇹🇴 Tonga · Civil Society Forum of Tonga

Tonga sponsors a Canadian company's claim to mine the Pacific abyss; Tongan civil society has spent six years asking its own government to withdraw, and is now petitioning the monarch.

🇳🇴 Norway · Norwegian Orca Survey

A small non-profit based in Andenes has built one of the world's longest continuous datasets on killer whales since 2014.

🇨🇱 Chile · Fundación MERI

A Patagonian research foundation's whale science helped Chile create a 100,000-hectare marine park protecting one of the Southern Hemisphere's last blue whale feeding grounds.

🇵🇹 Portugal · AIMM (Marine Environment Research Association)

A grassroots team of Portuguese marine biologists tracks dolphins and whales off the Algarve to keep Atlantic cetaceans safe.

🌍 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.

🇹🇴 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.

🇻🇺 Vanuatu · Vanuatu Environmental Science Society (VESS)

Volunteer divers photographing sea slugs and dugongs are helping Vanuatu chart marine life it has never formally recorded.

🇻🇺 Vanuatu · Wan Smolbag Theatre

What began as a 1995 play about sea turtles grew into Vanuatu's 260-plus-member community network protecting turtles, reefs, and mangroves across dozens of islands.

🇮🇳 India · Afroz Shah

The world's largest beach cleanup, started single-handedly by Mumbai lawyer Afroz Shah in 2015.

🇰🇲 Comoros · Association pour le Développement Socio-Économique d'Itsamia (ADSEI)

A village association on Mohéli turned a beach once fouled by poached turtle carcasses into one of the Southwest Indian Ocean's best-protected green turtle nesting sites.

🇨🇦 Canada · MiningWatch Canada

The company closest to mining the deep ocean is headquartered in Vancouver, and the watchdog documenting what its test runs actually did to the water is too.