Coastal hazards, such as erosion and flooding, pose significant threats to many coastal areas, and in extreme cases, have led to the decimation of some coastal communities. Historically, management has mostly focused on the use of grey infrastructure such as seawalls and groynes. However, these interventions are costly and can cause unintended consequences, promoting a shift toward Nature-based Solutions (NbS), such as the use...

West Africa has an extensive coastline stretching 7,367 km over 12 mainland countries and two archipelagos. The region’s coastal and marine ecosystems are among the most productive and biologically diverse in the world. However, the ocean resources are under intense anthropogenic pressures encompassing pollution, habitat degradation, biodiversity loss, overfishing, and climate-change-​induced sea level rise. These challenges c...

Providing reliable instrumentation that enables collection of high-​quality, comparable data is one of the most challenging aspects of establishing ocean acidification monitoring programs. This is especially true for under-resourced countries, where such data are mostly unavailable. In 2016, The Ocean Foundation (TOF) worked with international bodies, including the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Ocean Acidification Inter...

The Coastal Ocean Environment Summer School In Nigeria and Ghana (COESSING; https://coessing.org) has been run for one week every year since 2015. The school, an endorsed project of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030), has provided a platform for approximately 1,000 scientists from Africa, the United States, and Europe to exchange scientific knowledge, to network, to learn, and to...

The challenges facing the ocean and its resources have become increasingly complex and transboundary, requiring coordinated efforts for effective management and sustainable use. However, this coordination is currently hindered by the uneven distribution of capacity and equipment, particularly in developing regions. This article discusses project-based learning (PBL) as a pathway to transferring and sharing capacity in global o...

The Ocean Foundation’s Ocean Science Equity Initiative—EquiSea—was founded in 2022 to address systemic inequities in ocean science capacity and opportunities. It provides financial support for projects, coordinates capacity development activities, fosters collaboration and co-financing of ocean science, and supports the development of low-cost ocean science technologies. The EquiSea strategic framework was co-developed with in...

Microplastic ingestion by marine organisms presents a challenge to both ecosystem functioning and human health. We characterized microplastic abundance, shape, size, and polymer types ingested by the West African mangrove oyster, Crassostrea tulipa (Lamarck, 1819) sampled from estuaries and lagoons from the Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Benin, and Nigeria using optical microscopy and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) techniques...

The Citizen Observation of Local Litter in coastal ECosysTems (COLLECT) project (2021-2022) is a citizen science initiative, supported by the Partnership for Observation of the Global Ocean (POGO), which aimed to acquire distribution and abundance data of coastal plastic litter in seven countries: in Africa (Benin, Cabo Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Morocco, Nigeria) and Asia (Malaysia). In this paper, we describe the workflow...

Globally, over 85% of oyster reefs have been lost, and the combined effects of climate change, ocean acidification, and environmental degradation, including pollution and mangrove overharvesting, could further reduce global oyster fisheries in the coming decades. To understand the level of impact of climate change on the oyster fishery in West Africa, an expert-based vulnerability assessment to climate change was conducted for...