The ocean covers around 70% of our planet. Yet less than 1% of global philanthropic funding is directed towards its protection and restoration.
This gap matters. The ocean is responsible for roughly 50% of our oxygen, produced largely by tiny plankton drifting near the ocean’s surface. It is also home to an estimated 60% to 80% of our planet’s biodiversity.
WWF’s 2026 Living Planet Report highlighted how species abundance across marine ecosystems has declined by 59% since 1970, driven largely by overharvesting and human activity. At the same time, the ocean has absorbed around 90% of the excess heat generated by global warming. As we enter what’s shaping up to be the strongest El Niño on record, parts of the Pacific are forecast to rise more than 3°C above average.
Despite the scale of these challenges, conservationists continue to work against the clock to protect our world’s remaining wildlife and wild spaces. Earlier this month, we brought together three Whitley Award winners to share how science, community leadership and persistence are helping safeguard marine and freshwater species across the world. From penguins and manatees to hammerhead sharks, their stories offer reasons for hope.
Penguins: A sentinel of ocean health
Pablo Borboroglu first won a Whitley Award in 2010 and went on to receive the Whitley Gold Award in 2018. Founder of the Global Penguin Society (GPS), he has helped protect 3.5 million penguins and 32 million acres of coastal marine habitat – an area roughly the size of England.
Penguins have spent the last 60 million years evolving, enabling them to survive some of our planet’s most brutal conditions. Their ability to adapt has enabled them to spread from New Zealand across Australia, Africa, South America, and Antarctica. Today, Emperor Penguins are the only animals that can be found in Antarctica in the middle of winter, incubating their eggs at -50 degrees amidst storms of over 150 km per hour.
But the threats they face today are beginning to outpace their ability to adapt.
Climate change is compounding a range of existing pressures, including overfishing, pollution, habitat disturbance and invasive predators. Of the 19 recognised penguin species, over half are considered threatened by the IUCN.
For more than a decade, GPS has worked to strengthen penguin resilience by protecting breeding sites and reducing human interference on land. But Pablo and his team recognised a critical gap in conservation efforts.
“We have been able to protect millions of acres of penguin habitat, and also, we have been able to elaborate management plans for very sensitive areas where penguins breed on land. But penguins spend over 70% of their lives in the ocean,” Pablo explains. “So establishing marine protected areas is also key to help penguins remain resilient.”
Since April 2024, GPS has been tracking penguins along a 12,000 km migration route between Patagonia and southern Brazil to better understand where protection is needed most. Now, with support from WFN, they are launching a new multi-continental tracking initiative spanning three continents and four species: the Emperor, the Humboldt, the Magellanic, and the Little Blue Penguin.
By following penguins on these vast journeys, Pablo and his team can generate critical data to identify feeding grounds, migration routes, and areas of overlap with human activity, giving these species a greater chance of survival in a rapidly changing world.
Safeguarding the next generation of hammerhead sharks
While many fish populations have begun to stabilise after decades of overfishing, species like sharks and rays remain in steep decline.
2019 Whitley Award winner, Ilena Zanella decided to dedicate her life to the preservation of hammerhead sharks when she was a student of marine biology diving around Costa Rica’s Cocos Island. In her words, “When I dived with them, I really felt their vulnerability. They are very shy… I saw their beauty.”
At the time, conservation efforts primarily focused on “cleaning stations” around oceanic islands such as Cocos. Reproduction can be rough if you’re a female hammerhead. Females often carry bite wounds inflicted by males during mating and after, they visit cleaning stations so smaller fish can feed on any parasites in their wounds, cleaning them.
But Ilena recognised that the greatest threats lay elsewhere. When pregnant females migrate to sheltered coastal waters to give birth, they can become entangled as bycatch, while their offspring are frequently caught and used as bait for commercially valuable fish such as snappers.
To combat this, Ilena began working with fishing communities to identify the most important nursery grounds for the Critically Endangered scalloped hammerhead shark. As a result, in 2018, the Costa Rican government declared the world’s first sanctuary for scalloped hammerhead sharks in Golfo Dulce.
Today, with help from WFN, Ilena continues to monitor shark populations while restoring mangrove forests that provide essential nursery habitat. These coastal ecosystems act as safe havens for juveniles during their earliest and most vulnerable years, giving them a greater chance of surviving to adulthood.
From marine to freshwater habitats: Protecting manatees
Unlike penguins and hammerhead sharks, manatees depend on both marine and freshwater environments. Found in the rivers, lakes, estuaries and coastal waters of 21 African countries, they are a powerful reminder that marine and freshwater systems are deeply connected.
According to 2024 Whitley Award winner Aristide Kamla, Cameroon’s Lake Ossa is the “capital city” of the African Manatee. Around 50 km inland from the Gulf of Guinea and covering over 3,000 hectares, Lake Ossa is Cameroon’s largest natural lake. Yet just a few years ago, its ecosystem was on the brink of collapse, destroyed by a rapidly spreading species: salvinia molesta. This invasive floating fern can double in size within days and excess levels of nitrogen and waste runoff from nearby industry made Lake Ossa a prime breeding ground. By 2021, it covered 50% of the lake.
Dense mats of salvinia on the surface of the lake smothered native plants that manatees rely on for food and blocked their access to the surface. For an animal that must surface every five or so minutes to breathe, the salvinia made Lake Ossa uninhabitable. The manatees began to disappear.
Working with local communities, Aristide’s team initially tried to remove the salvinia by hand. But despite their efforts, the plant was spreading faster than it could be cleared.
“In the beginning we didn’t believe we could get rid of these plants which were proliferating so fast,” Aristide explains.
So he changed tactics. Following around two years of negotiation with government authorities, his team imported a tiny weevil from the US that feeds on salvinia. Thanks to the efforts of Aristide and his team, 99% of the salvinia covering Lake Ossa has now been cleared.
“Today, I’m seeing more manatees than even before salvinia,” Aristide celebrates.
But new challenges are emerging. Only the lake itself is currently protected, and with construction of new roads nearby as well as the expansion of Cameroon’s largest city, the riparian forest surrounding the lake is increasingly under threat. Backed by WFN, Aristide is now looking beyond the water itself to safeguard the future of African manatees.
Rooting conservation in local communities
Spread across multiple continents and species, these Whitley Award winners are connected not just by their commitment to protecting our natural world, but by their approach. Whitley Award winners are rooted in the communities within which they work, and this is key to their success as conservationists.
“Politicians come and go…who stays? The communities and stakeholders. When you work with the community you make sure these plans and decisions are safe for the long term because those people are invested in those community and public processes,” Pablo explains.
When many of the biggest threats facing wildlife stem from human activity, local support is essential. In Costa Rica, Ilena worked closely with fishers and coastal communities to secure protection for the world’s first scalloped hammerhead shark sanctuary. Now, former fishers are helping her restore mangroves that provide shelter for juvenile sharks.
Around Lake Ossa, Aristide’s work has helped bring an end to manatee poaching while building local support for restoring and protecting the lake’s ecosystem.
“The success relies on working in collaboration with the community,” Aristide comments. “You have to bring them into the equation because if you do conservation just as isolated work you will never succeed.”
For more than 30 years, WFN has supported conservationists like Pablo, Ilena and Aristide – grassroots leaders who combine scientific expertise with a deep understanding of the places and communities they serve.
Conservation is rarely about quick wins. Real progress can take years. But after decades working in the field, Pablo has seen what dedication, persistence, and the right support can achieve: “I can see the positive impact of our conservation actions, and many of them thanks to the support of Whitley Fund for Nature, and that gives us hope for the future. Because what we decide to care about can have an impact far beyond our own lives. And my main lesson of my conservation journey is that perseverance has the power to turn hope into action and when we work together, with perseverance, in conservation, we can shape the future.”
Watch our highlights from WFN’s Evening of Ocean and Opera:
