2026

MALINDI, Kenya (AP) — The unfinished restaurant is still little more than concrete walls and wooden beams. As her daughter sweeps away the last piles of sand, 54-year-old Nuru Mohammed directs women hanging fishing nets to serve as décor. In a few days, the beachside restaurant on Kenya’s Indian Ocean coast will open, offering another way to earn a living.

“For us women, this is hope,” says Mohammed, who for most of her life was one of the few fisherwomen in Malindi, a town northeast of the port city of Mombasa. “It will help support many families that have depended on the ocean for decades.”

Across East Africa’s coast, fisherfolk are increasingly turning to tourism, ecosystem restoration and other conservation-based businesses, reinventing their relationship with the sea as climate change, overfishing and declining ocean health threaten their livelihoods.

In Kenya, women are turning restored mangrove forests into sources of income through beekeeping and ecotourism. In Tanzania’s Zanzibar archipelago, fishing communities are protecting coral reefs through locally managed closures. In Mozambique, sea grass restoration is creating jobs while reviving marine habitats. Together, these efforts are redefining resilience, not as leaving the ocean behind, but as restoring it while building enduring livelihoods.

“Communities that depend on the ocean are also its best stewards,” said Andreane Martel, project director for a conservation program dubbed ReSea. “When local people, especially women, lead conservation, they protect biodiversity while creating more resilient and inclusive livelihoods.”

Mohammed said she has lost boats to theft and now struggles to compete with industrial trawlers. A nearby Chinese-owned fish processing facility reflects the dramatic changes for the industry.

“I can’t compete with that kind of power or scale,” she says.

“It has been tough,” Mohammed says, looking toward the ocean. “I fought to remain a fisherwoman. But I think it’s a fight I can no longer win.”

Ten kilometers (six miles) away, where the Sabaki River meets the Indian Ocean, Beatrice Mwanyiro oversees a mangrove nursery and restaurant built by ReSea, a 30-member women’s self-help group supported by the Canadian government.

“We have to adapt to the changing times,” Mwanyiro says. “The number of fish coming into the shallow waters are falling every year. Without another source of income, we won’t be able to feed our families.”

Mangroves, coral reefs, sea grass meadows and nearshore fisheries provide food, protect coastlines from storms and store vast amounts of carbon. But those ecosystems are imperiled by warming oceans, pollution, habitat loss and overfishing.

Mohamed Somo, a leader of fishermen in Lamu, a UNESCO heritage site, says boats that used to come in with catches of up to 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of fish now often bring home less than 30 kilograms (66 pounds).

Kenyan law restricts trawlers to waters at least 5 nautical miles (9 kilometers) offshore, but fishers say some vessels routinely operate much closer. The challenge extends beyond Kenya. Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing costs the global economy an estimated $23 billion annually while threatening marine biodiversity and the food security of billions who depend on fish as a primary source of protein, according to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization.

“The trawlers fish offshore during the day, but at night they move into the shallow waters where artisanal fishers work,” Somo says. “By morning, there’s very little left for us.”

The growing pressure on coastal communities has pushed ocean conservation higher on the political agenda as communities struggle for survival and try to protect their ocean economies.

“Coastal communities are on the frontlines of climate change and declining ocean health, but they are also among the strongest drivers of resilience,” said Jerry Mang’ena, co-founder and executive director of Action for Ocean, a Tanzania-based organization that restores mangroves along its coastline.

“Supporting sustainable livelihoods, from aquaculture and eco-tourism to ecosystem restoration, helps families adapt while reducing pressure on the ocean. If we’re serious about protecting our seas, we must invest in the people who have cared for them for generations.”

At the recent Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, conservation groups urged African governments to ratify the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement, or “High Seas” treaty, a landmark U.N. pact establishing marine protected areas in international waters and fair sharing of marine resources. It entered into force in January, and as of April had been signed by 145 countries and ratified by 81.

The outcome of negotiations over additional ratifications of the treaty could have a profound impact on the lives of fisher people like Mohammed as they try to build futures that no longer depend entirely on increasingly uncertain catches.

“The BBNJ Agreement gives African governments a historic opportunity to protect the high seas and safeguard the future of our fisheries,” said Aliou Ba, oceans campaign lead at Greenpeace Africa.

“But protecting the ocean also means confronting illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing that is stripping African waters of marine life and robbing coastal communities of food and income,” he said. “Governments cannot afford to delay.”

____

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

source

LONDON (AP) — The drama that seems to surround Prince Harry returns to the UK this week, and the previews already have the British press buzzing with anticipation.

King Charles III’s wayward son is traveling to the land of his birth for a series of charity engagements that begin Tuesday. But for most royal watchers that’s just background noise.

For the past 10 days, British tabloids and news broadcasts have been filled with speculation about whether Harry’s wife, Meghan, will accompany him and, more importantly, whether they will bring their two children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, so they can finally get to know Grandpa Charles. But everything is up in the air as Harry seeks to arrange protection for his family after a government committee refused to authorize taxpayer funded security.

“With just days to go until Harry’s first public engagement in the UK on Tuesday … very little is guaranteed at all,” the Times of London reported on Saturday. “For Archie and Lilibet to meet the king, it’s now or never,’’ wrote the Telegraph.

Harry, a British army veteran who served in Afghanistan, planned the visit to mark a year before the Invictus Games, the Paralympic-style competition he founded to motivate and inspire military veterans around the world as they work to overcome battlefield injuries.

Not on the official schedule but very much in the media spotlight, however, is a decision Tuesday at the High Court in London, where the judge will reveal his verdict in Harry’s invasion of privacy lawsuit against the publisher of the Daily Mail.

The decision about whether to bring the children, according to reports based on off-the-record briefings and unidentified people close to the royals, hinges on whether the U.K. government agrees to provide security for Harry and his family. It is an issue that has hung over every trip the prince has made to Britain since he and Meghan decamped to North America six years ago.

British authorities say Harry isn’t entitled to blanket protection because he is no longer a working member of the royal family and they will assess his security on a case-by-case basis, just like any other celebrity. Harry says it is unsafe for his children to travel to Britain without protection because his family remains a target simply by virtue of their royal status.

The decision rests with a government committee known as Ravec, that rules on who should get state-funded protection.

The outcome could be problematic for the royal family, which is trying to show that it provides value for money after months of embarrassing headlines about the links between the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the former Prince Andrew, now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

“In the paranoid atmosphere of waiting for more Andrew shoes to drop, Ravec and the royals themselves are terrified of public blowback if taxpayers are asked to fund protection for the House of Sussex,’’ royal commentator Tina Brown wrote on X. “The issue is not a hill that either the king or the government wants to die on, and who can blame them?’’

After initial reports that Archie, 7, and Lilibet, 5, would visit the U.K., plans began to wobble after the Daily Telegraph reported that Ravec had again rejected Harry’s request for protection.

The Times of London reported that Harry was “distraught” after the decision and told friends he wouldn’t let his children be “chased by paparazzi” through the streets of London.

By Sunday, it was clear that the family wouldn’t accompany Harry when he arrives in the capital on Monday, though there was still a chance they would join him later in the trip.

Nonetheless, Harry has said that he wants to reconcile with his 77-year-old father, who is being treated for an undisclosed form of cancer. And he really wants his children, who first met the monarch during celebrations for the late Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee in 2022, to spend time with their grandfather now that they are old enough to remember the experience.

Tension within the House of Windsor have been strained ever since Harry and Meghan gave up royal duties and moved to California to pursue lucrative media deals free from the pressures of royal life in London.

They reached a new low after Harry published an explosive memoir that included unflattering depictions of the royal family and damning allegations of a toxic relationship between the monarchy and the press.

Harry’s description of royals leaking information about other members of the family in exchange for positive coverage of themselves is just one of the tawdry allegations in his book, “Spare.” The prince was especially scathing about Queen Camilla, accusing her of feeding private conversations to the media as she sought to rehabilitate her image, after her longtime affair with Charles when he was heir to the throne.

After losing a court battle over the security issue last year, Harry said he hoped to rebuild relations with his family, even as he suggested that the royals had sought to prevent him from receiving police protection to punish him for walking away from royal duties.

“I would love reconciliation with my family. There’s no point in continuing to fight anymore,” Harry told the BBC. “I don’t know how much longer my father has.”

source