Ocean & Fisheries

Marine protected areas are conservation tools that, if designed and managed effectively, can preserve biodiversity, enhance food provision, mitigate climate change impacts, and improve resilience by addressing or mitigating current and future threats. We develop new conservation planning approaches and evaluate different spatial conservation strategies that explicitly consider, and often reconcile, seemingly conflicting objectives from diverse ocean users. 

New technologies allow us to capture and access high-resolution data better and faster than ever before. These revolutionary developments help illuminate real-time activity in the ocean, even in the most remote areas. We develop new governance, policy, and management interventions that are designed specifically to make use of these data, thus improving management, conservation, and livelihood outcomes around the world.

Unsustainable exploitation of common pool resources is largely a consequence of governance systems that reward over-extraction and undervalue conservation. Drawing on insights from economics, we develop and analyze market-based interventions to reverse these incentives to align conservation with economic prosperity.

Top-down management and philanthropy are often essential to bolster conservation efforts, but we believe that alternative conservation finance options, designed to work in low-governance and incomplete property rights settings, can accelerate long-term solutions. We design new financing options, and work with private sector partners to tailor existing tools, to provide a toolkit for innovative and effective ocean conservation finance. 

Climate change has already had a significant impact on ocean productivity, species’ distributions, and ocean chemistry. These and other climate change related impacts on ocean ecosystems are only expected to intensify. We develop and analyze management strategies that are adaptive to the effects of climate change and support resilient ecosystems and sustainable blue economies.