David Maraga, Kenya’s former chief justice, stood shoulder to shoulder with activists in Nairobi, not in a courtroom but on the front lines of a protest to save 75 acres of Nairobi National Park from being paved into a car park. His arrest, alongside other demonstrators, underscored a growing public demand for nature’s protection — a sentiment echoing through the halls of the Our Ocean Conference taking place just miles away. There, African and Commonwealth nations issued a powerful call to action, urging swift ratification and implementation of the High Seas Treaty, a landmark agreement designed to safeguard 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030. With oceans under 'severe strain' from climate change, overfishing, and pollution, according to the UN’s third World Ocean Assessment, the stakes could not be higher. Yet amid the challenges, signs of resilience emerge: global mangrove forests are now growing faster than they’re being lost, reversing decades of decline driven by coastal development and aquaculture expansion.
At the same conference, the UK pledged £13.9 million in marine conservation funding, a signal of growing political will. Meanwhile, fisheries and aquaculture hit a record high of 235 million tonnes in 2024, underscoring both the ocean’s bounty and the pressure it faces. Scientists, too, are gaining new tools to understand and protect biodiversity. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has digitised 7.4 million plant and fungi specimens, unlocking a treasure trove of data. When combined with AI, this digital archive revealed that plant flowering times have shifted by a median of 2.5 days per decade over the past 100 years — a quiet but profound signal of climate disruption. The tropics, home to the greatest biodiversity, show the most variation, suggesting ecosystems there are especially sensitive to change.
Alarm bells also ring for the plant and fungi kingdoms: 40% of the 70,000 assessed plant species are at risk of extinction, while 330,000 more remain unstudied. For fungi, the picture is even murkier — 90% of an estimated 2 million species are still unknown to science, and fewer than 1% have been assessed for extinction risk. Yet this crisis also holds a spark of hope: digitalisation and AI could transform how we monitor and respond to biodiversity loss before it’s too late. As Colombia enacts a landmark law requiring deforestation-free beef supply chains, and India reworks agricultural plans in anticipation of El Niño’s droughts, the world is showing flickers of systemic change. Even financial institutions are being watched: 59% of the world’s largest still lack deforestation policies, according to Global Canopy’s Forest 500 report. But with public pressure rising — from scientists, citizens, and even former judges — the tide may finally be turning.