The taxi boat shoots past Lamu Town, a UNESCO World Heritage site famous for being the oldest and best preserved Swahili settlement dating back to 1370.
It is a hot and sunny afternoon, and the 20-minute ride on clear turquoise water that shimmers under the blazing sun comes to a stop and docks on the beach next to a nondescript boatyard.
At last, the Flipflopi dhow boat that made global headlines in 2019 comes into full view.
Beneath the ocean’s surface is nature’s living art exhibition. Coral reefs are a testament to the beauty and diversity of life below water. As sunlight pierces the surface, it illuminates the coral colonies revealing an explosion of colours, each housing its own fascinating ecosystem.
In October 2022, endurance swimmer and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Patron of the Oceans Lewis Pugh became the first person ever to swim across the Red Sea, a staggering 123 km journey that took 16 days.
It has been another season of extreme weather, with everything from record temperatures to devastating floods hammering countries around the world.
Record-setting endurance swimmer Lewis Pugh is this week's guest on the Awake At Night podcast hosted by UN communications chief Melissa Flemming.
The abandoned shrimp farms and salt pans that litter Sri Lanka’s coastline are a testament to the pitfalls of unsustainable development.
Industry and infrastructure have erased swaths of the biodiversity-rich mangrove forests that used to sustain fishing communities and protect them from extreme weather.
In October 2020, Australian scientists found a detached coral reef skyscraper on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef—nearly 500 meters tall and 1.5 kilometres wide— that exceeds the height of the Eiffel Tower
In 2014, coral reefs around the world turned a pallid white from heat stress. The bleaching began in the Pacific and rapidly spread across the Indian and Atlantic oceans. The so-called Third Global Bleaching Event lasted for 36 months, marking the longest, most pervasive and destructive coral bleaching incident ever recorded.
Though over now, the world’s reefs remain in hot water.
On the launch of the report, Impacts of Sand and Dust Storms on Oceans: A Scientific Environmental Assessment for Policy Makers, author and University of Oxford lecturer, Nick Middleton discusses how the dust cycle affects and interacts with other global-scale biogeochemical cycles.
