The University of Queensland, Australia, has announced the breeding of heat-tolerant corals that have been genetically edited to enhance their ability to withstand heat with symbiotic algae, increasing their survival rate by 50 percent at sea temperatures of 32 degrees Celsius. The technology has been transplanted on an experimental basis on the Great Barrier Reef,…

On 29 March, the German government launched a €100 million budgeted munitions clean-up project in the Lübeck Bay in the southwestern Baltic Sea to remove 1.6 million tons of conventional munitions and 5,000 tons of chemical weapons left over from World War I and World War II. The Helmholtz Centre for Marine Research in Kiel…

Funchal, the capital of Portugal’s Madeira archipelago, was declared the world’s first “plastic-free ocean” city in March, banning the sale of single-use plastic products and investing 20 million euros in a marine waste recycling facility. The program aims to protect long-finned pilot whales in nearby waters, whose mortality rate from accidental consumption of plastic trash…

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, the two countries reaffirmed their joint efforts to promote global marine conservation, supported the entry into force of the Agreement on Marine Biodiversity in Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ), and plan to present the Nice Ocean Action Plan at the UN Oceans Conference in…

In March 2025, Indonesian environmental organizations exposed the illegal dumping of plastic waste in the sea off Jakarta, involving several multinational companies. Indonesia’s Ministry of Environment launched an investigation and called on the international community to strengthen regulation of the plastics trade.

Microplastics detected for the first time in Finland’s Sámi waters, as Arctic pollution risk increases. Microplastics interact with climate change to threaten marine biota and affect human health through the food chain, according to a UN report. Globally, about 14 million tons of plastic waste ends up in the oceans each year, and by 2040…

On March 30-31, 2025, the French government and the Oceano Azul Foundation will host the “Save Our Oceans” conference in Paris, aiming to promote the 2030 target of protecting 30% of the oceans and to warm up for the UN Oceans Conference in June. Topics will include investment in the blue economy, coral reef restoration…

Recently, the Norwegian government’s deep-sea mining program has attracted international attention. Although the country’s parliament passed a bill in January 2024 approving commercial deep-sea mining in the Arctic Circle’s roughly 280,000 square kilometers of sea and planning to issue the first exploration licenses in the first half of 2025, the plan has been “postponed” due…

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) launched the 11th round of Fukushima nuclear contaminated water discharge on March 12, discharging 7,800 tons on a single day, and the cumulative total amount of water discharged into the sea has exceeded 1.34 million tons. This move has continued to raise concerns about marine ecological safety in the international…

On the morning of March 10, local time, a U.S. military-chartered tanker collided with a Portuguese container freighter in North Sea waters east of East Yorkshire, England. After the collision, the tanker caught fire and emitted a large amount of black smoke, the British Coast Guard deployed helicopters, airplanes and fire-fighting vessels to carry out…