Trawl the sea or mine for metals? Pacific nations wrestle with how to protect oceans – and livelihoods

Dotted across the north-west of the Pacific Ocean, the limestone islands of Palau rise like forested domes. Beneath the waves, reefs pulse with activity – fish dart through coral gardens, turtles drift nearby, while sharks with black-tipped fins shadow a passing tourist boat.

Nearly a decade ago, the country took a bold step to safeguard this vibrant seascape, declaring 80% of its waters a no-fishing sanctuary.

But support for the sanctuary – which covers a massive area about the size of Sweden – has soured among some Palauans. Those who rely on the ocean feel caught between the need to feed their families and the rules designed to protect their waters.

“If 80% of Palauan waters is a marine sanctuary, where am I going to get my fish?” asks Dennis Daniel, a waste management worker, while drinking beer on the shoreline of Palau’s most populous town, Koror. Fishermen have struggled to supply the local tuna markets, fuelling frustration over the nation’s strict fishing restrictions.

As a result, Palau’s government wants to reopen parts of the sanctuary to allow more fishing. It plans to shrink its no-fishing zone by more than a third and open a new fishing port on the west coast of its largest island.

Officials argue the move will help families like Daniel’s, while still protecting half of Palau’s waters from commercial fishing. Critics, however, warn that scaling back protections will only harm Palau’s marine diversity, already vulnerable to the climate crisis.

Palau’s struggle is not unique. In communities across the region, where the ocean is often their biggest resource, mounting economic pressures are forcing a rethink of environmental commitments.

Collectively, small island Pacific states manage roughly 10% of the planet’s oceans, making their decisions critical not only for their own futures, but for the health of marine ecosystems worldwide. The Pacific is also home to some of the most valuable fisheries in the world, with the region supplying about 30% of the world’s tuna.

In 2017, the Cook Islands designated its entire ocean as the world’s largest marine park, called Marae Moana. Beneath these same waters lie a vast wealth of polymetallic nodules rich in cobalt, copper, nickel and manganese – and over the past four years the Cook Islands’ government has been exploring the possibility of commercially developing these underwater minerals in areas outside certain protected zones, at least 100km off its coasts. That could include seabed mining.

The Pacific nation has granted three exploration licences for companies to map and analyse its seabeds, and is working on developing technical and environmental assessments to guide any future seabed mineral activities.

Seabed mining is not under way in Cook Islands as it conducts assessments and studies feasibility. In an email interview with the Guardian, the Cook Islands prime minister, Mark Brown, said no minerals harvesting or mining “will be permitted until the scientific basis is clear”.

“We are 99.99% ocean and 0.01% land, so it is inevitable that we will turn to our blue economy for further opportunities for our future prosperity,” Brown said in written responses to the Guardian’s questions.

“As a Pacific island nation, the Cook Islands are deeply conscious of the need to protect our environment while creating sustainable opportunities for our people.”

Meanwhile, in 2021 Kiribati announced it would reopen a world heritage site and one of the world’s largest marine protected areas to commercial fishing, citing the strain of lost revenue. Palau’s president, Surangel Whipps Jr, said the move highlights the challenges Pacific nations often face meeting their conservation aspirations with economic survival.

“There was no sustainable financing there, there was no system in place to ensure that [Kiribati’s marine sanctuary] can go on,” Whipps told the Guardian. “So at the end of the day, they had to feed their people.”

Whipps says Palau is facing a similar predicament, but hopes the redesign of its marine sanctuary would prove to other Pacific nations they “can do both”: protect the ocean while reaping fish and profit from it.

Not everyone agrees on how best to strike this balance. Palau’s former president Tommy Remengesau Jr, who led the sanctuary’s creation during his presidency, says the sanctuary rollback is an unnecessary undoing of Palau’s globally leading commitments.

“It doesn’t make sense to open up a good thing,” he says. “The sustainability of our ocean resources are being threatened and, unless we balance conservation and harvesting, there won’t be a future for our children.”

Palau’s waters are considered especially biodiverse; a recent National Geographic expedition recorded the region’s highest abundance of key species, like silky shark and yellowfin.

However, researchers also found abandoned fishing gear and depleted shark populations: clear signs of overfishing. They concluded that Palau and similar Pacific nations needed “large protected areas” to prevent further decline.

Though the size of this protection remains a subject of heated debate, the sanctuary is broadly supported by Palauans – particularly tourism workers who view it as a vital draw for visitors.

Captain Troy Ngiraikelau weaves his boat through the emerald maze of Palau’s islets, shuttling tourists to dive sites. He says he has noticed fewer schools of fish on the reefs compared with when he was a child, and is therefore supportive of Palau’s ambitious marine protections.

“There’s a lot of people who live in Koror, so if they go out every weekend and fish everything then we end up with nothing,” Ngiraikelau says. “I think it’s good that we have the marine sanctuary.”

Tourism once employed a quarter of Palau’s workforce, generating more than 40% of the nation’s wealth. Legislators hoped the sanctuary would further boost ecotourism, but its launch in 2020 coincided with the Covid pandemic, causing a steep drop in the sector and plunging the country’s economy into crisis.

“One thing we learned from the impact of Covid-19 is that we cannot rely on developing Palau’s economy just based on tourism,” says Palau’s environment minister, Steven Victor. “We need to diversify our economy.”

For fishing companies tasked with leading this economic revival, marine protections are harming their bottom line. Jackson Ngiraingas, a former politician who owns Palau’s only domestically flagged longline tuna fishing boat, says increasing the fishing zone is his only path to catching enough fish to sell overseas and become profitable.

“We have to expand to the international market for export, because that’s where the money is,” he says.

About 3% of the planet’s ocean is currently under adequate marine protections, according to the Marine Conservation Institute. The UN has set a goal to protect at least 30% of oceans by 2030, but there are fears marine sanctuaries are not being created fast enough to meet this target.

Prof Kate Barclay, a marine social scientist specialising in Pacific fisheries from the University of Technology Sydney, says the region’s reefs are susceptible to overfishing so “those are where you really do need to be very careful for environmental sustainability”.

At the same time, deep sea mining remains an emerging frontier for Pacific nations. Views on the practice are mixed – 32 countries around the world have called for a moratorium on the industry, while some Pacific nations like Kiribati, Tonga, Nauru and the Cook Islands are exploring the potential of the sector.

Brown acknowledges and shares concerns that seabed mining could undermine marine health. Through its marine park, he says his government has built a sustainable model for balancing conservation and his people’s livelihoods.

He adds that “robust laws and strict environmental safeguards” will ensure any future seabed development “protects the integrity of our ocean heritage and supports our conservation goals”.

“Seabed minerals exploration provides an opportunity to diversify our economy and strengthen our resilience to challenges like climate change and global economic shifts, especially as we currently rely heavily on tourism,” he says.

Barclay says it is unfair to criticise Pacific countries, who have limited industries and are suffering the impacts of climate change, for seeking wealth in their oceans.

“I don’t think it’s my position … to tell them what they should or shouldn’t do with their resources,” she says.