The Hidden Cost of Tuna: Discrimination on board European fishing vessels
New report amplifies first-hand accounts of discriminatory treatment faced by many West African crew members working on board European vessels.
22 July 2025
Annual Reviews
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2024 Annual Review
Blue Marine acts as a catalyst, working alongside small-scale fishers, local organisations and governments to deliver effective marine conservation.
30 December 2024
2023 Annual Review
We’re at an historic moment for ocean protection and Blue Marine intends to seize every opportunity to drive change.
01 January 2024
2022 Annual Review
As our dynamic ocean conservation charity embarks on its 13th year, this is where we take stock of our progress and reveal in detail some of the amazing stories behind our battle to save the world’s oceans.
31 December 2022
Financial Statements
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2024 Financial Statements
The Trustees present their report and the audited Consolidated Financial Statements of Blue Marine Foundation for the year ended 31 March 2024.
09 April 2024
2023 Financial Statements
The Trustees present their report and the audited Consolidated Financial Statements of Blue Marine Foundation for the year ended 31 March 2023.
29 April 2023
2022 Financial Statements
The Trustees present their report and the audited Consolidated Financial Statements of Blue Marine Foundation (“Blue Marine” “the charitable company”) for the year ended 31 March 2022.
21 April 2022
Climate Reports
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State of the World’s Saltmarshes
Saltmarshes are vital yet undervalued coastal ecosystems – home to extraordinary biodiversity, protectors of coastal communities, and quiet allies in our efforts to address climate change.
11 June 2025
Navigating Change: The role of Climate-Smart MPAs in achieving 30×30
Learn more about climate-smart marine protected areas (MPAs) and how they can help safeguard ocean ecosystems while advancing global climate and biodiversity goals.
24 April 2025
Blue Thread: Aligning National Climate and Biodiversity Strategies
The ocean at the heart of climate and biodiversity interactions.
14 October 2024
Economics Reports
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Credit Where Credit’s Due: Identifying the Core Principles for a High Integrity Biodiversity Credit Market
We are facing unprecedented loss in biodiversity globally in large part due to the unsustainable use of our land and seas. With biodiversity being crucial for combating climate change, providing essential resources like food and water and supporting livelihoods, the cost of inaction is far greater than the cost of taking action for nature, climate, people and the global economy.
18 July 2024
High Integrity Marine Natural Capital Markets in the UK a Roadmap for Action
The United Kingdom has long been a centre for pioneering and world-leading innovation made possible through collaboration across sectors, from academia to finance. Recently, the great power of this collaboration has been catalytic in the creation of markets, like offshore wind, that simultaneously deliver jobs, green growth, and critical progress towards net zero.
14 May 2025
Developing a UK seagrass carbon code
The UK has experienced a staggering loss of up to 92% of its seagrass habitat, resulting in significant negative impacts on both nature and people.
25 June 2023
Education Reports
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Building Climate-Ocean Education into the Curriculum: Teacher Training Guide
This guide explores the urgent need to equip young people with ocean-climate education that builds scientific understanding, inspires action, and supports a more hopeful, sustainable future.
17 February 2025
Blue Ocean Learning Toolkits; Boosting Ocean Conservation with Education
Ocean Education is key to long-term conservation success. A BOLT is aimed to be used in areas where our partners report a weak connection between communities and the ocean.
23 January 2025
An Ocean Literacy Toolkit for Namibia
Every person on earth is connected to the ocean, from the food we eat to the air we breathe. No matter where you live, be it by the coast or many miles inland, the ocean features in your life every single day.
14 December 2024
Investigations Reports
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The Hidden Cost of Tuna: Discrimination on board European fishing vessels
New report amplifies first-hand accounts of discriminatory treatment faced by many West African crew members working on board European vessels.
22 July 2025
The UK’s Tuna Blind Spot
Blue Marine Foundation, French NGO BLOOM Association and Greenpeace UK are calling on UK retailers to stop selling tropical tuna caught around drifting FADs in the Indian Ocean by not entering into any new supply agreements for tuna caught in this way.
09 November 2023
The Necessity of Protecting Fisheries Observers at Sea
An independent Case Study of European Union commercial fisheries monitoring and oversight highlighting the need for increased Fisheries Observer protections. Human rights apply at sea, as they do on land.
26 October 2023
Legal Reports
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Poor Quota Management Decimating Coastal Livelihoods
Quota can be a highly effective environmental tool for sustainably fishing stocks, but environmental tools work most effectively when they have social licence. Blue Marine has a key concern arising from research conducted in both the UK and around the world, that a poorly constructed quota market can have adverse consequences on fishing communities themselves and therefore perverse consequences on the ground. Environmental legislation is only effective if it supports long term stability in decision-making.
24 March 2024
National Marine Parks – Legal Review
‘Two things are characteristic of this age, and more particularly of this island. The conscious appreciation of natural beauty, and the rapidity with which natural beauty is being destroyed … This passion for natural beauty that consumes so many of us to-day, found recent expression … in the sphere of practical effort …’
- M. Trevelyan, ‘An Autobiography & Other Essays’ (1949) 92
30 June 2023
Best Practice in World Fisheries: Lessons for Brexit
The purpose of this conference was to look at how other countries around the world managed their fisheries and to consider what lessons the United Kingdom might learn from their experience and apply to its own waters in the event of leaving the EU and its Common Fisheries Policy (CFP).
27 November 2017
Media Reports
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Ocean Brochure
Released alongside OCEAN WITH DAVID ATTENBOROUGH, the brochure supports a campaign exposing the hidden destruction of bottom trawling in UK marine protected areas and calls for urgent action to end it.
06 May 2025
Save African Penguins
Critically endangered African penguins face extinction by 2035 due to food shortages from climate change and overfishing, prompting urgent action to secure fishing closures around key breeding colonies.
08 March 2025
Against Longlining
The Maldives is home to some of the most incredible biodiversity on the planet. At the beginning of August, 2024, the new government made public its intention to reopen longline, a highly destructive fishing technique incompatible with a healthy ocean ecosystem. One in five of the animals caught by longline hooks are unintended catch – endangered sharks, turtles, seabirds and more.
29 August 2024
Policy Reports
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The Four Horsemen of the UK Fisheries Policy Apocalypse
The UK has the responsibility, and the policy frameworks available, to provide meaningful and lasting protection to all its marine areas. This includes the government proceeding with and concluding its plans to remove bottom trawling from MPAs, safeguarding the biodiversity and habitats that they were designed to protect.
28 September 2025
Protected or Not Protected?
Learn more about the percentage area of the seabed within England and Scotland Marine Protected Areas with full protection from the bottom towed gear.
06 December 2024
Strong Overseas, Weak at Home. Parliamentary Briefing
All life on Earth depends on the health of our ocean. However, the ocean is in crisis, pushed to its limits by overfishing, which is threatening the ocean’s capacity to provide its vital functions of providing oxygen, absorbing CO2 and regulating the Earth’s temperature.
28 November 2021
Science Reports
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30×30 Ocean Action Plan
To help meet the 30×30 target, a two-pronged Action Plan is presented to support context-specific strategies and guide implementation by all governments and relevant stakeholders involved in the push to 30×30. The Action Plan does not aim to create new mechanisms or prescribe fixed solutions. Rather, it serves as a unifying call to align ongoing efforts, illuminate the enablers already within reach and encourage the collective resolve needed to turn ambition into tangible action.
19 September 2025
BLUEprint for MPAs
This BLUEprint provides guidance for groups and communities planning or developing a marine protected area (MPA) through a framework of questions. The guidance is supported by case studies drawn from projects where Blue Marine Foundation has had years of involvement. It is designed to be used by anyone championing the establishment of a new MPA or involved in its management and we hope it provides some useful insight to support long-term success.
02 March 2023
Turkey Case Studies
Once heavily overfished, parts of Turkey’s coastline now show how well-enforced marine protection can revive biodiversity and boost local livelihoods, with fish populations increasing tenfold and incomes rising by 400%.
08 February 2023
UK Reports
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Marine Protected Areas in UK Seas: Management of Damaging Fishing – 2025 Stock Take
By 1990, the UK had three marine reserves and joined the emerging EU Natura 2000 network, aiming to protect biodiversity under the Habitats and Birds Directives from COP 1992.
22 May 2025
An Environmental Husting for Guernsey – Formal Report
With an election due to take place on the 18th June, Blue Marine Foundation hosted an environmentally focussed husting on the 21st May, designed to inform and empower voters who care about the future of Guernsey and its natural environment.
21 May 2025
UK Kelp Recovery
Kelp forests are some of the most productive on Earth and provide a wealth of goods and services to human society. At the same time they are at risk from human activities such as climate change, destructive fishing practices and pollution.
28 March 2025
Impact Reports
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Impact Report 2024
Blue Marine Foundation is continually responding to the dynamic set of challenges that the ocean faces. Our work sits at the nexus of climate, biodiversity and human development. The question that drives everything that we do is always: what have we achieved for the marine environment? This report aims to answer that question, using a rigorous monitoring and evaluation framework developed by our team with external expert support.
01 April 2024
Convex Reports
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Convex Seascape Survey Annual Report – Year Three
As we reflect on the second year of the Convex Seascape Survey, we stand at an intersection of knowledge, progress, and challenge. Our journey has taken us deeper into the enigmatic world beneath the ocean’s surface, revealing invaluable insights about the role of the seascape in carbon storage and how this could help mitigate climate change.
05 August 2025
Convex Seascape Survey Annual Report – Year Two
As we reflect on the second year of the Convex Seascape Survey, we stand at an intersection of knowledge, progress, and challenge. Our journey has taken us deeper into the enigmatic world beneath the ocean’s surface, revealing invaluable insights about the role of the seascape in carbon storage and how this could help mitigate climate change.
23 March 2024
Convex Seascape Survey Annual Report – Year One
One of the critical, unsolved scientific questions of our time is how the ocean impacts climate change. The seascape is the ultimate sink for carbon emissions and, in a time of climate emergency, could be an immense ally in efforts to slow runaway planetary warming.
01 May 2023
Newsletters
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Into the Blue: August/September 2025
This issue of ‘Into the Blue’ features trailblazing court cases which pave the way forward for environmental justice in the EU courts and a new report by Blue Investigations that reveals the exploitation of West African crews by European tuna vessels.
25 September 2025
Into the Blue: July/August 2025
This issue of ‘Into the Blue’ features trailblazing court cases which pave the way forward for environmental justice in the EU courts and a new report by Blue Investigations that reveals the exploitation of West African crews by European tuna vessels.
04 August 2025
Into the Blue: June/July 2025
This issue of ‘Into the Blue’ features trailblazing court cases which pave the way forward for environmental justice in the EU courts and a new report by Blue Investigations that reveals the exploitation of West African crews by European tuna vessels.
25 July 2025
After almost 100 years on the planet, I now understand the most important place on Earth is not on land, but at sea.
David Attenborough