Community‐based coastal governance is essential for biodiversity conservation and sustainable livelihoods, yet many communities continue to face significant challenges in establishing and sustaining effective governance systems. We sought to improve understanding of the current status of community‐based coastal governance across five countries in the Southwest Indian Ocean (SWIO) region of Africa. Using the Elinor tool and dat...

Monitoring the governance and management effectiveness of area‐based conservation has long been recognized as an important foundation for achieving national and global biodiversity goals and enabling adaptive management. However, there are still many barriers that prevent conservation actors, including those affected by governance and management systems from implementing conservation activities and programs and from gathering...

Coastal saltmarshes are found globally, yet are 25%–50% reduced compared with their historical cover. Restoration is incentivised by the promise that marshes are efficient storers of ‘blue’ carbon, although the claim lacks substantiation across global contexts. We synthesised data from 431 studies to quantify the benefits of saltmarsh restoration to carbon accumulation and greenhouse gas uptake. The results showed global marsh...

Understanding the relative effectiveness and enabling conditions of different area‐based management tools is essential for supporting efforts that achieve positive biodiversity outcomes as area‐based conservation coverage increases to meet newly set international targets. We used data from a coastal social–ecological monitoring program in 6 Indo‐Pacific countries to analyze whether social, ecological, and economic objectives a...

Subtidal marine sediments are one of the planet's primary carbon stores and strongly influence the oceanic sink for atmospheric CO 2 . By far the most widespread human activity occurring on the seabed is bottom trawling/dredging for fish and shellfish. A global first‐order estimate suggested mobile demersal fishing activities may cause 0.16–0.4 Gt of organic carbon (OC) to be remineralized annually from seabed sediment carbon...

Despite broad recognition of the value of social sciences and increasingly vocal calls for better engagement with the human element of conservation, the conservation social sciences remain misunderstood and underutilized in practice. The conservation social sciences can provide unique and important contributions to society's understanding of the relationships between humans and nature and to improving conservation practice and...