Welcome to issue No. 132 of SEVENSEAS Travel Magazine. This month we follow recovery on a Caribbean reef, a marina trial that could end polystyrene in our harbours, and a UNESCO report reframing 2,260 protected places as one planetary network. We sit with the Director of Peace Boat US, return to the Edges of Earth expedition after three years at sea, listen to the ocean through hydrophones, and meet a campaign in São Paulo asking what a Brazilian flag looks like without blue or green.

The SEVENSEAS Mentor Network: Build Your Community

A new initiative connecting marine professionals across generations, pairing emerging conservationists with seasoned mentors to build the kind of community many wished they had at the start of their careers. [Read more]

Three Years on Earth’s Edges, an Expedition Reflects

After three years circumnavigating the planet’s most remote coastal communities, Andi Cross reflects on what an expedition teaches you about belonging, the people you meet, and the edges where the ocean still feels wild. [Read more]

No Blue, No Green: Droga5 Reframes the Ocean Crisis

Droga5 São Paulo and SOS Oceano Marinho launch a campaign that strips the blue and green from the Brazilian flag, making the disappearance of healthy oceans impossible to look away from. [Read more]

Sounds of the Ocean: From Inspiration to a Movement

A yoga teacher’s encounter with sound becomes a project mapping the acoustic life of the ocean, weaving hydrophone recordings, music, and listening practice into a tool for ocean awareness. [Read more]

King of the Seaducks, Enduring Sign of Chesapeake Winter

Biologist Donald Webster watches the crimson-headed canvasback return to the Chesapeake, the largest estuary in the United States, asking each winter whether the king of seaducks will keep its court on the Bay. A field portrait of an iconic wintering species and the seagrass that sustains it. [Read more]

What HungerMap LIVE Reveals About World Fisheries

A close look at the World Food Programme’s real-time hunger dashboard, what fisheries data is missing, why coastal communities slip between the cracks of food security tracking, and what better signal would look like. [Read more]

SeaKeepers Names Dr. Mark Luther Scientist Chairman

The International SeaKeepers Society opens a new chapter in ocean research leadership, with Dr. Mark Luther of the University of South Florida joining as its first Scientist Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Council. [Read more]

Salone del Mobile 2026 Stakes a Claim on Sustainability

Milan’s design week leans into sustainability with A Matter of Matter, an installation that asks the design industry to take material accountability as seriously as form. [Read more]

After Bleaching, Little Cayman Shows Early Recovery

Two years after the most extreme coral bleaching event on record, CCMI’s 2025 Healthy Reefs Report Card delivers the first quantitative signs that Little Cayman’s reefs may be turning a corner. [Read more]

UNESCO’s New Report Frames Conservation as a Network

The first cross-network report from UNESCO treats its 2,260 World Heritage Sites, Biosphere Reserves, and Geoparks as one planetary infrastructure for biodiversity, climate stability, and the communities that depend on them. [Read more]

Falmouth Trials the World’s First Concrete Pontoon

Falmouth Harbour partners with Cornish marine engineers ScaffFloat to test what is believed to be the world’s first all-concrete marina pontoon float, a move to phase out polystyrene microplastics from leisure marinas. [Read more]

A Satellite AI Maps Ocean Currents Like Never Before

A new satellite-based AI from a University of Rhode Island team led by Dr. Nick Pizzo reveals ocean surface currents in unprecedented detail, sharpening our picture of how heat, nutrients, and plastics travel. [Read more]

Peace Boat US Director Emilie McGlone, In Her Words

On the MV Pacific World, training young leaders at sea, and how a global voyage becomes a platform for ocean conservation and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. [Read more]

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Falmouth, Cornwall, UK. Falmouth Harbour is trialling the world’s first all-concrete marina pontoon float, designed and built by the team at ScaffFloat in neighbouring Penryn, in a first step to removing all Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) floats from its leisure and commercial operations.

The Harbour has pledged to move away from EPS products in the light of mounting evidence that polystyrene microplastics in the world’s oceans inflict serious damage on the marine environment and life within it. Polystyrene, globally used for its lightness and buoyancy, is made from fossil fuels, is virtually un-decomposable, and when it breaks down into microplastics can be ingested by marine life with devastating consequences.

“The amount of broken-up polystyrene around our creeks and rivers, particularly after this year’s storms, is awful to see and very hard to clean up without damaging the delicate ecology of our shorelines. Expanded Polystyrene fragments in the marine environment pose a serious ecological concern, as seabirds, fish, turtles and other fauna mistake EPS beads for food, which can cause internal injuries or death; entering the food chain poses health risks to humans as well.”

Vicki Spooner, Environment Manager, Falmouth Harbour

Inside the Reef Float: an inert, recyclable alternative to EPS

Penryn marine company ScaffFloat Ltd has tackled the challenge of finding alternatives to traditional pontoons by inventing the “Reef Float.” Their first commercial prototype, made entirely from concrete, has been undergoing trials beneath a Falmouth Harbour pontoon. ScaffFloat developed the new product as part of a business development project that received £284,787 from the UK Government through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund as part of Cornwall’s Good Growth Programme.

The Reef Float’s buoyant core is made using ultra-low-density waterproof concrete, instead of EPS foam, and the core is then cast inside a high-strength engineered concrete skin. In the highly unlikely event that a Reef Float ever failed, the materials would simply sit inertly as stone in the marine environment, whereas a cracked-open EPS float exposes its polystyrene foam core to the marine elements.

“We replaced a failing EPS pontoon float at Falmouth Harbour with a Reef Float, where it survived all that this January’s storms could throw at it. It’s what we would expect, of course, as we’ve designed it to be strong with an ultra-long life. But it’s also completely inert in the marine environment and 100 percent recyclable, so a game-changing alternative to the EPS floats currently used all over the world.”

Toby Budd, Founder and Managing Director, ScaffFloat

Local innovation, global stage

Local MP Jayne Kirkham, checking out the new Reef Float in Falmouth, called it “exactly the kind of innovation we want to see in Cornwall: local businesses developing practical but cutting-edge solutions to global environmental challenges. Cutting polystyrene pollution from our waters while creating skilled jobs is a win for our marine environment and our economy. I’m proud to see government funding helping projects like this lead the way.”

“Falmouth Harbour has made the conscious decision to move away from EPS foam pontoons in all our operations, and it’s fantastic that our neighbours at ScaffFloat are the first company to offer a plastic-free alternative. Reef Floats are easily installed, in situ, on a rolling basis, as and when we need to replace old EPS floats, and they have a zero-cost, 100 percent recyclable end-of-life disposal. It’s another tremendous example of Cornish ingenuity, and we look forward to working with them into the future.”

Miles Carden, CEO, Falmouth Harbour

The Reef Float team has been shortlisted for the Innovation Award at Marina26 in Australia this May, with an invitation to attend and present at the biggest marina conference in the world, demonstrating what a major issue EPS has become for the marina industry and legislative authorities alike.

Australia itself lost more than 1,000 pontoons in the 2022 Queensland floods, where they broke up and created an environmental disaster known as the “White Spill,” with the ocean and beaches covered with EPS balls that were almost impossible to clear up.

Learn more. For more information on Reef Float and parent company ScaffFloat, visit scafffloat.co.uk/reeffloat. For more on Falmouth Harbour, including its wide-ranging environmental initiatives, see falmouthharbour.co.uk.

Adapted from a press release issued by Louise Midgley Communications, on behalf of ScaffFloat and Falmouth Harbour.

Little Cayman, Cayman Islands. Marking Earth Day 2026, the Central Caribbean Marine Institute (CCMI) released its 2025 Healthy Reefs Report Card, revealing early signs of recovery and renewed hope for Little Cayman’s reefs after the most extreme coral bleaching event on record in 2023.

The summer of 2023 was the hottest ever measured, and it brought with it one of the most extensive global coral bleaching events in modern history, decimating reefs from the Caribbean to the Indo-Pacific and casting their future in doubt. CCMI’s Healthy Reefs campaign has tracked Little Cayman’s reefs since 1998, and the 2024 surveys delivered the bleakest numbers in the program’s history: coral cover had collapsed to 9.8 percent, down from 26 percent before the marine heatwave.

This year’s data tells a different story. The 2025 surveys, summarized in the new Report Card, show coral cover edging back up to 13.4 percent. The shift is not yet statistically significant, but the direction is unmistakable: recovery in Little Cayman has begun.

A site-by-site picture

Zoom in from the island-wide average and the recovery looks more layered. Twenty percent of surveyed sites posted a significant increase in coral cover between 2024 and 2025. One site, Coral City, held the line entirely through the bleaching, exhibiting no significant loss. In total, 30 percent of sites have either maintained pre-bleaching coral levels or demonstrated significant recovery this year. The remaining 70 percent show either minor, non-significant recovery or no recovery at all.

Reef recovery is rarely visible on a 12 to 24 month horizon. Corals are slow-growing animals, and even after a disturbance ends, biologists typically expect at least three years before measurable rebound, and a minimum of seven years (sometimes nearly thirty) for a reef to return to pre-bleaching baselines. Against that timeline, what CCMI is recording in 2025 is striking: the resilience built into Little Cayman, with strong protections and minimal local disturbance, appears to be doing exactly what reef science predicts it should do.

Fish populations holding the line

While coral cover is still climbing back, fish populations have continued to thrive. CCMI has documented consistent increases in fish density since 2016, with a dramatic jump in density and biomass in 2024 that held through 2025. That matters more than it might sound: herbivorous fish keep macro-algae in check, and when algae is left unchecked it can smother corals and block new recruits from settling. A healthy reef-fish community is, in many ways, what makes coral recovery possible at all.

A Hope Spot earning its name

Little Cayman is a Mission Blue Hope Spot, a designation that frames the island as a small-but-mighty example of what marine protection can look like when conservation is prioritized. Under the pressures the ocean is now under, that framing reads less like marketing copy and more like a working hypothesis the reef is steadily proving out.

The island has form here. Little Cayman’s Nassau grouper spawning aggregation rebounded from roughly 1,000 individuals to nearly 9,000 over a decade, one of the most cited recovery stories in the Caribbean. The early coral signal in the 2025 Report Card could become another chapter in that record.

The nursery, and three resilient genotypes

CCMI’s coral nursery was hit hard during the 2023 bleaching, losing close to 90 percent of its stock. Genetic work in the aftermath identified three staghorn coral genotypes that survived nearly 20 degree-heating weeks. Since 2023, those three genotypes have rebuilt the nursery from just 17 fragments to nearly 300 as of March 2026. CCMI’s nursery likely represents one of the last remaining populations of the critically endangered staghorn coral, Acropora cervicornis, in Little Cayman.

Why this matters beyond Little Cayman

Hope Spots like Little Cayman do not just protect their own waters. They function as larval source populations, exporting recruits along ocean currents to less resilient reefs downstream. In a warming ocean where many sites have lost their capacity to bounce back unaided, these pockets of resilience are increasingly the difference between regional collapse and regional recovery.

The 2025 numbers do not erase what 2023 took. Coral cover is still well below pre-heatwave levels, and the recovery is partial, uneven, and fragile. But for the first time since the bleaching, the trendline is pointing in the right direction. As CCMI puts it, research and science-based actions are critical right now to understand the ecological processes driving this resilience and to translate that understanding into management and protection.

Acknowledgments

CCMI thanks this year’s Healthy Reefs sponsors: Wheaton Precious Metals International, Foster’s Supermarket, Cayman Water, and Ugland Properties; and the Restoration program sponsors who made the work possible: The Ernest Kleinwort Charitable Trust, Artex Cayman Islands, Walkers, and Marfire.

Read the full 2025 Healthy Reefs Report Card at tinyurl.com/CCMI-25HRR and learn more about the Healthy Reefs campaign at reefresearch.org/our-work/research/healthy-reefs/.

Adapted from a press release issued by the Central Caribbean Marine Institute (CCMI), April 22, 2026. Photo credit: CCMI.