Sponsor An Ocean?
Tiny Island Nation of Niue Has Novel Plan to Protect its Slice of the Pacific
Story and photos by The Associated Press
The tiny Pacific island nation of Niue has devised a novel plan to protect its vast and pristine territorial waters. It will get sponsors to pay.
Under the plan, launched by Niue Premier Dalton Tagelagi in September 2023, individuals or companies can pay $148 to protect 1 square kilometer of ocean from threats such as illegal fishing and plastic waste for 20 years.
Niue hopes to raise more than $18 million by selling 127,000 units, representing the 40% of its waters that form a no-take marine protected area. “Niue is just one island in the middle of the big blue ocean,” Tagelagi said. “We are surrounded by the ocean, and we live off the ocean. That’s our livelihood.”
He said Niueans inherited and learned about the ocean from their ancestors and want to pass it on to the next generation in sustainable health.
Most fishing in Niue is to sustain local people, although there are small-scale commercial operations and occasional offshore industrial-scale fishing, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing depletes fish stocks, which then cannot replenish, while plastic waste is ingested by and entangles marine wildlife. Climate change has also led to warmer and more acidic oceans, altering ecosystems for marine species.
“Because of all the illegal fishing and all the other activities at the moment, we thought that we should be taking the lead, to teach others that we’ve got to protect the ocean,” Tagelagi said.
Niue is also especially vulnerable to rising sea levels threatening its land and freshwater and the island is susceptible to more intense tropical storms charged by warmer air and waters.
With a population of under 2,000, Niue is one of the world’s smallest countries, dwarfed by an ocean territory 1,200 times larger than its land mass. Under the plan, the sponsorship money — called Ocean Conservation Commitments — will be administered by a charitable trust.
Niue will buy a sponsorship unit for each citizen. Other launch donors include philanthropists Lyna Lam, founder of the United States-based nonprofit A Khmer Buddhist Foundation, and her husband, Chris Larsen, who co-founded blockchain company Ripple, as well as U.S.-based nonprofit Conservation International, which helped set up technical aspects of the sponsorship program.
Under conventional funding approaches to ocean conservation, nations such as Niue must constantly seek support project by project, said Maël Imirizaldu, marine biologist and regional leader with Conservation International and the Blue Nature Alliance.
“The main idea was to try and switch that, to change the priority and actually help them have funding so they can plan for the next 10 years, 15 years, 20 years,” Imirizaldu said.
