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Graffiti in Kochi, Kerala, shows the whale shark (Rhincodon typus), the world’s largest fish, found along India’s coastline but remains poorly studied. In Kerala, fisher-reported sightings and landings led to the Save the Whale Shark Campaign (2022) with fishers and fisheries departments. Globally, the IUCN lists the whale shark as Endangered, with populations declining worldwide. Credit: Ashwarya Bajpai/IPS

By Aishwarya Bajpai
DELHI, Feb 5 2026 (IPS)

Melanie Brown has been fishing salmon in Bristol Bay, Alaska, for more than 30 years. An Indigenous fisherwoman and a coordinating committee member of the World Forum of Fisher Peoples, she speaks about the sea with deep care and lived knowledge.

When interviewed for IPS on Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), a global conservation policy introduced by the IUCN in 1999, Brown sounded both hopeful and cautious.

“It’s interesting,” she said. “Where I fish in Bristol Bay, if you follow the river upstream, it eventually reaches a lake system. Right at the point where the lake meets the river, there is a national park.”

Brown fishes the Naknek River, which has had a steady salmon run for years.

Melanie Brown, an Indigenous fisherwoman and a Coordinating Committee member of the World Forum of Fisher Peoples.

“I really believe it’s because of that park,” she said. The park, Katmai National Park, was created long before the UN’s 30×30 target — the global goal to protect 30 per cent of land and sea by 2030 — was signed in December 2022. It was first protected after a historic volcanic eruption in 1922 and later became a tourist attraction. Inside the park is Brooks Falls, where bears are often seen catching salmon.

Indigenous people are still allowed to fish in parts of the park, but only with special permission. Brown explained how salmon change when they enter freshwater.

“In the ocean, they’re shiny and silver. In freshwater, they turn red. They look different. They taste different.” Brown continues, “They stop feeding once they hit freshwater. All they care about is spawning. Dried salmon is important for us. It’s how we preserve food.”

She said this kind of protection has worked because it didn’t erase Indigenous fishing. But when it comes to Marine Protected Areas, she has mixed feelings.

“If an MPA stops people from doing their traditional fishing in places they’ve always fished, that’s wrong,” she said. “That shouldn’t happen unless there’s a real overfishing problem.”

Brown believes decisions should be made with the fishing communities.

“You can’t just draw a fenced area on a map and tell people they can’t go there anymore,” she said. “You need to work it out with the regulatory bodies and the fishers.”

Still, Brown knows MPAs can work if they are written well. In southeast Alaska, she said, a marine protected area was created to stop factory trawlers. “Small boat fishing is still allowed. The big industrial boats are kept out, but local fishers can continue.”

For her, the lesson is simple: protection and fishing do not have to be in conflict when communities are involved.

Community Custodianship in Kerala

Kumar Sahayaraju, a marine researcher with Friends of Marine Life (FML).

That idea of community involvement also emerged in an interview with Kumar Sahayaraju, a marine researcher with Friends of Marine Life (FML), who is also from a traditional fishing community in Trivandrum, Kerala, and a scuba diver. He believes MPAs only make sense when they are shaped by the people who live with the sea.

“It would be good if marine protected areas were created with community involvement,” he told  IPS. “That’s why internationally there is a push for co-management — a bottom-up approach.”

Sahayaraj spoke about reefs off the coast of Trivandrum — underwater ecosystems that fishing communities have used for generations. “These reefs were part of our traditional fishing grounds,” he said. “They were like a commons.”

But large mechanised and trawler boats have now entered these reef areas. “They are damaging the reefs and catching all the fish,” he said. “These reef fish supported traditional fishers for generations.”

Like Brown, Sahayaraju sees MPAs as a possible tool.

“In a situation like this, an MPA could give custodianship back to traditional fishers and stop destructive fishing methods,” he said. But he stressed that protection alone is not enough. “Access, authority and custodianship must remain with the community. That’s the only way MPAs can work for people and for the ocean.”

This tension between protection and access is playing out across the world as governments push new conservation solutions to deal with climate change and biodiversity loss. One of the biggest is the UN Convention on Biological Diversity’s 30×30 target. MPAs are now central to this goal.

Global Targets, Local Realities

Nayana Udayashankar, Senior Programme Officer at Dakshin Foundation.

Nayana Udayashankar, Senior Programme Officer at Dakshin Foundation, who works at the intersection of law, policy and marine conservation, explained that in India, Marine Protected Areas are legally set up under the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, and future MPAs will follow the amended Act of 2022.

“This law allows two kinds of conservation measures,” she said. “One is area-based protection, and the other is species-based protection.” MPAs, she added, fall under different categories of protected areas within this law. The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) has notified several MPAs across the country, including the Gulf of Mannar National Park off the coast of Tamil Nadu.

But Udayashankar questioned the core logic behind how many MPAs are designed.

“The fundamental idea of MPAs is often ‘no-take’ and the exclusion of humans from certain spaces,” she said. “That approach doesn’t always work for marine conservation.”

According to her, area-based protection in the sea is especially difficult.

“Marine life doesn’t stay in fixed ranges,” she explained. “Fish move constantly. You can’t just draw a boundary or fence off a part of the ocean and expect everything to stay inside it.”

She also pointed to wider contradictions in how conservation is practised.

“Several studies by agencies like CMFRI and the Gulf of Mannar Marine Biosphere Reserve Trust have clearly shown the ecological importance of both the Gulf of Mannar and the adjacent Palk Bay,” she said. “But at the same time, ecologically damaging activities just outside these MPAs continue.”

Unsustainable fishing practices and other coastal activities, she warned, threaten this rich marine ecosystem and undermine both conservation goals and sustainable development efforts.

Udayashankar stressed that she is not against conservation.

“A large number of people depend on marine resources for their livelihoods and income,” she said. “Sustainable fishing and other nature-based activities should be at the heart of any serious marine conservation approach.”

She argued that conservation strategies must be site-specific and shaped by local ecology.

“Most importantly, fishers need to be at the forefront of fisheries and coastal management, because they are directly dependent on healthy ecosystems.”

This may require changes in existing laws and policies. She pointed to alternatives such as Locally Managed Marine Areas, which Dakshin Foundation supports.

“These allow more flexibility and can meet multiple conservation objectives,” she said.

Udayashankar also highlighted Kerala’s fishing councils under the Kerala Marine Fisheries Regulation Act, where fishers participate in managing local fisheries.

“These initiatives are not perfect,” Udayashankar said, “but they are a step in the right direction.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Grosse Destinationen profitieren in der laufenden Saison mit einem Gästeanstieg von 3 Prozent. Insgesamt gingen die Zahlen im Vergleich zum Vorjahr um 4 Prozent zurück. Kleine und tiefgelegene Bergbahnen haben zu beissen.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres (left), is participating in a meeting with the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in Brussels, Belgium. Credit: UNRIC/Miranda Alexander-Webber Source: UN News

By Simone Galimberti
KATHMANDU, Nepal, Feb 5 2026 (IPS)

Will trade be enough to navigate the current waves of chaos and disorder that are underpinning the ongoing rifts among competing powerful and hegemon nations and the rest?

Amid tectonic shifts in the realm of geopolitics and international relations, amid what the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recently defined as a “rupture” in the rules-based multilateral order, trading is seen almost as a panacea.

Yet are we really sure that new and alternative trading partnerships like the ones the European Union has signed with the Mercosur and India are the only ways to cope with an increasingly unpredictable American administration and an over confident and more ambitious China?

Mark Carney in his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos a few weeks ago offered a blueprint for middle powers like Canada on how they can become less dependent on big hegemon powers.

While he was tacitly describing a tactic to tackle a bossy, unpredictable and more and more authoritarian president south to the border, Mr. Carney provided a foundational framework on how countries like Canada can leverage its natural resources and bet big on the power of trade with alternative markets.

No one doubts that trade can open valuable new options for established economies as well for new emerging ones like India.

The EU has also pivoted to this realm, using new commercial deals as a way to strengthen its own resilience and boost its economy while having no other options than maintaining a good relationship with the USA. But a playbook entirely focused on trade will also hit the wall.

While useful in the short term to escape from or at least try dodging expansionist maneuverings from Washington or Beijing, trade has limitations as well. A comprehensive and long-term response to these new difficult emerging circumstances cannot but be political.

Trade should be seen as a part of a broader toolkit of policies centered on nations committing themselves to invest more on regional projects of cooperation with other nations.

Strengthening political ties among neighboring nations through enhanced economic partnerships could offer the initial impetus to a new form of international regionalism.

Yet nations, while capitalizing on the economic dimensions of their bilateral relationships, should also be powered by a bolder, wider and importantly, more inspiring design.

The need for initiatives that, by intent, go beyond economics while dealing with other nations, would provide the space to imagine new political entities that could get respected and even compete with the existing hegemonic powers.

Imagine how trade and economics was underpinning and turbocharging the project of regional cooperation in post second world war Europe.

With the time, what was a mere economic association, a successful story of cooperation among equals , the European Economic Community turned into something more visionary and braver, a project of regional integration.

As we know from the recent episodes of confrontations generated across the Atlantic that humiliated and defamed Europe, this project is far from being accomplished.

Capitals from around the world, in the Global South and Global North alike, need to understand one thing: only the pursuit of a wider vision with multiple and complementary elements of integration that transcend economy, can offer them the safest route to be able to remain independent.

The building of regional cooperation frameworks, think of Association of South East Asian Nations or the Southern Africa Development Community, can offer a pathway to uphold their members’ internal legitimacy among the citizens while at the same time, cementing their power in the realm of international relations.

Yet the lesson from Europe is clear: economic cooperation and even economic based integration can only go so far.

Only an unequivocal support for more audacious projects can provide states with the leverage needed to deal with few but unrestrained hegemonic powers like China and Russia but also the USA with the second Trump administration.

As difficult and daunting as it is, only regional integration can offer nations a degree of collective power that will earn them some decent amounts of respect. Unfortunately, even regional cooperation is in shambles.

The Southern Common Market or Mercosur despite hitting the headlines with the recent signing of a trade agreement with the EU, (an agreement that the European Parliament, the semi-legislative chamber of the EU, “paralyzed” it with a vote to deferring its legality to the European Court of Justice) is nowhere resembling a politically integrated body of nations.

Who remembers the existence of the Union of South American Nations or UNASUR? Even ASEAN, seen as a model of regional cooperation, is at risk of losing its credibility with its famed “centrality” being put in question.

In Africa, the potential of SADC has evaporated while the most promising and bold attempt of building a political union, the East African Community (EAC) that was supposed to transform itself into a real federation, the East African Federation, also lost considerable steam.

Thanks to Mr. Trump’s ego and dramas stemming from it, the EU is now forced to reconsider its current trajectory of regional integration.

At this current pace and course, the EU will never be able to stand its ground and remain united and cohesive in tackling both overt and veiled threats and blackmails from the hegemonic powers vying to dominate the world.

The EU must be able to project power beyond its economic realm as Mario Draghi, the former Italian Prime Minister and President of the European Central Bank recently shared at the KU Leuven University in Belgium.

“Power requires Europe to move from confederation to federation” because as things stand now, Europe cannot even imagine to be able to survive as it is now.

“ “This is a future in which Europe risks becoming subordinated, divided and de-industrialized at once, and a Europe that cannot defend its interests will not preserve its values for longer.”

Mr Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister, should be praised for mincing no words in Davos. But rupture in the current multilateral order cannot be fixed with band aid solutions.

As much as important trade remains, it is going to be delusional to believe that, alone, it can do the job, in sewing and patching up the rupture that has been created and offer a very potent but still incomplete solution for nations.

We need initiatives that, by design, are fit to build political projects that, while start with nation states at the center, are able to envision, in a not too far horizon, a much more daring political project.

Brussels, as the de facto capital of the EU, could again provide a blueprint for this quantum jump towards a new phase of the European political project that can finally pursue deeper forms of union that, inescapably, would embrace federalism.

After all, the best way to preserve a nation’s standing is to invest in new forms of shared sovereignty.

This should not be a priority only for middle powers like Canada or the members of the EU. Even developing nations must come to terms with this new order and understand that their survival will be only guaranteed through ambitious initiatives of regional cooperation that have only the sky as the limit.

Unfortunately for Mr Carney and Canada, geography is unforgiving.

Who knows, perhaps we could imagine what are now unimaginable ties that would perpetually bind Ottawa with Europe or Mexico and the Caribbean.

Simone Galimberti writes about the SDGs, youth-centered policy-making and a stronger and better United Nations.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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