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Feature Destination

Conservation Photography with Karim & Jack

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What’s In Our Newsroom

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The FREE Weekly Conservation Post and Jobs List

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Since 2004, SEVENSEAS Media has fostered an informal and non-partisan platform to promote understanding of key issues and challenges while building partnerships across an increasingly diverse group of marine conservation professionals and students.

Our mission is to promote communication and build partnerships across the global marine community and to identify and address gaps in the community’s work. SEVENSEAS Media achieves this through multimedia promotion and partnerships. The community consists of a diverse and growing group of participants, including non-governmental organizations, government agencies, foundations, bilateral and multilateral agencies, fellowship programs, independent consultants, and academia/students.

If you are interested in contributing or getting involved, email us Here. 

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The medieval settlement of Unguja Ukuu, on the Zanzibar Archipelago off the coast of Tanzania, was a key port in an extensive Indian Ocean trade network that linked eastern Africa, southern Arabia, India and Southeast Asia.

Our archaeological research shows how human activities between the seventh and twelfth centuries AD irreversibly modified the shoreline around the site. At first, these changes may have helped the trading settlement develop, but later they may have contributed to its decline and abandonment.

Ancient seafaring

For millennia, the Indian Ocean has been the maritime setting for an early form of globalisation. Large trade networks operated across the vast ocean, foreshadowing modern global shipping networks. Unguja Ukuu was a crucial location in this early trade and an important node in the nascent slave trade out of continental Africa.

Unguja Ukuu was an active settlement from the mid-first millennium until the early second millennium AD. Archaeological evidence and historical accounts suggest Unguja Ukuu is one of the earliest known trading settlements on the Swahili coast.

The rise and fall of trading ports

To understand how and why early ports thrived or declined, it is important to know how the coastal landscape influenced the way traders operated. This includes their choice of mooring locations and their connections to inland locations. 

But the question of how these commercial activities in turn modified the coastline has received less attention.

Unguja Ukuu prospered in an ecologically marginal zone, hemmed in between the sandy back-reef shore of Menai Bay and mangrove-banked creeks to the east. 

Menai Bay afforded shelter from monsoonal storms and navigable waterways across the shallow inner shelf to the shore. It also provided food and other materials from the mangrove habitat. 

This landscape enabled the emergence of the farming, fishing, and trading settlement of Unguja Ukuu.

Sediment, sand and shells

We studied sediments, back-beach sands, and shells at Unguja Ukuu to understand how the settlement had affected its own environment. We found the accumulation of coastal sediments over centuries led to significant changes in the landscape.

Detritus from the settlement, such as food remains, hearths and other domestic waste, helped the beach spread outward into the sea. Our analyses show how human waste and the compaction of ancient surfaces drove the coastline change, supporting the emergence of a major trading site.

As more land was used for urban living and agriculture, more sediment moved from the land to the sea. This contributed to rapid growth of beach fronts, physically altering the coastal landscape and the ecological conditions of the adjacent sea-scape. 

These changes in turn could have resulted in habitat shifts and silting of the lagoon which possibly contributed to Unguja Ukuu’s decline. 

Early human impacts

Human-made processes might also be implicated in the decline and eventual abandonment of Unguja Ukuu in the second millennium AD. This was an important period in the socio-political and economic transformation of coastal African societies, marking the emergence of maritime Swahili culture. 

But suggesting a purely environmental cause for the settlement’s abandonment would be too simplistic. The interaction of coastal villages and harbours with their dynamic landscapes may have had a role in this regional reorganisation of settlements, harbours, and trade flows.

New advances in archaeological science techniques, combined with systematic archaeological analyses, are increasingly allowing us to disentangle natural from human-made drivers of events. Such work often reveals far earlier human impacts than once envisioned, shedding light on the early roots of Earth’s current geological epoch: the Anthropocene, in which human activity is a key force reshaping the planet. 

Human-made soil

Our work records snapshots of the evolution of a natural coastal system at the fringes of an early settlement. 

River sediments were covered by beach sands containing increasing amounts of human waste accumulating from the mid-seventh century AD. This backshore activity area was used for small-scale subsistence activities (including processing shells for meat), trade, and the dumping of industrial waste. 

Earlier urban development shaped Unguja Ukuu’s soils over the long term and through periods of settlement decline and abandonment from the twelfth century AD onwards. A dark earth “anthrosol” (human-made soil) continues to evolve on these archaeological deposits today, supporting cultivation in and around the modern town.

Dark human-made soils such as these, formed by the rapid decay of organic- and phosphate-rich waste from the settlement, may be used as markers for as-yet-undiscovered archaeological sites on the eastern African coast. Their distinctive dark colour renders the soils easily identifiable on satellite images and other remote-sensing datasets.

Understanding the past to shape the future

Our study clearly shows how human modification of natural environments affected coastal landscapes on an East African island more than 1,000 years ago. These findings are a reminder that humans have been changing our environment for thousands of years – sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. 

Studying history and archaeology is not simply about learning from our ancestors’ mistakes so that we don’t repeat them. It is also about ensuring that scientifically rigorous data that show how human activity in the past often altered the landscapes and environments in which people lived is effectively communicated, to both governments and the public. 

If we can do this we might be able to make better informed sustainable choices for the future of our planet.

See the original post here…

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At the BlueInvest Days 2022 in Brussels, Commissioner Virginius Sinkevičius and EIF Deputy Chief Executive, Roger Havenith announced today a new dedicated equity initiative for the blue economy under InvestEU. The initiative will mobilize an additional EUR 500 million of EU funds for financial intermediaries investing in this sector. Commissioner Sinkevičius also announced that the European Commission’s successful BlueInvest initiative will continue beyond 2022 until 2026.

European Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius, responsible for Environment, Oceans and Fisheries, praised the achievements of the BlueInvest initiative, which in the past 3 years has been highly successful in terms of getting hundreds of SMEs coached and matched with investors. The initiative has led to a large number of financing deals being signed, has strengthened the investment landscape for the blue economy, increased investor awareness and helped bridge the finance gap for blue technology SMEs and start-ups.

He said: “The first phase of the platform acted as an accelerator to foster innovation and investment in sustainable technologies for the blue economy. To further deepen and scale up these activities, we are now launching the second stage of BlueInvest. This will provide an even better service to European SMEs and investors, and more impact to support the European Green Deal objectives.”

EIF Deputy CE, Roger Havenith said: “After the success of the pilot initiative launched under EFSI, we are now very excited to be launching the new InvestEU Blue Economy initiative to support European businesses in the blue economy. Climate action and environmental sustainability are a top EU priority. We are confident that this initiative will make a meaningful contribution in that direction, making financing available to support innovative businesses and ambitious entrepreneurs that seek to find solutions to the blue economy challenges.

From BlueInvest to InvestEU Blue Economy

InvestEU Blue Economy, the scaled-up equity initiative that builds on the BlueInvest Fund pilot under EFSI, brings together the European Maritime, Fisheries and Aquaculture Fund, the EIB Group and InvestEU finance, thereby mobilising an additional EUR 500 million of EU funds for financial intermediaries investing in this sector. This will result in EUR 1,5 billion of risk-financing available to innovative and sustainable blue economy SMEs and start-ups, via financial intermediaries. The call for expression of interest will be soon published by the EIF.

As a novelty, the BlueInvest platform as well as the EIF and EIB will provide capacity building and advisory support for financial intermediaries and impact investors targeting investments in the blue economy

Background information

BlueInvest is a platform and accelerator to foster innovation and investment in sustainable technologies for the blue economy. It provides investment readiness support and access to finance for early-stage businesses, SMEs and scale-ups. BlueInvest is enabled by the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund.
Achievements so far, include:

• the 200 SMEs that have received investment readiness support through bespoke coaching meeting their individual needs,
• the online project pipeline of 2400 projects and its online projects showcase of 300 high-profile companies looking for investment
• the 24 grant agreements that have been closed with innovative Blue Economy projects, 
• company-investor matchmaking facilitated through 40 events and 3400 B2B meetings
• the 25 deals with private investors that have been facilitated through the BlueInvest platform, 
• the more than €100 million public EU funds allocated through the EIF BlueInvest Fund pilot to intermediaries (Venture Capital Funds) that will enable these to invest up €300 million (with private capital) into sustainable blue economy.

The InvestEU Fund aims to mobilize more than €372 billion of public and private investment through an EU budget guarantee of €26.2 billion that backs the investment of implementing partners such as the European Investment Bank (EIB) Group and other financial institutions. 

The InvestEU Fund operates through four policy windows that mirror key Union policy priorities: sustainable infrastructure; research, innovation and digitisation (RID); SMEs; social investment and skills. 

The EU Guarantee will be further increased by top-up contributions from the EU Sectorial Programmes. This includes €140 million from the European Maritime, Fisheries  and Aquaculture Fund for the period 2021-2027 and allocated under the InvestEU Equity product. This contribution is matched with InvestEU resources and EIF/EIB own funds.

Under InvestEU, the EIB Group (comprised of the EIB and EIF) will implement 75% of the EU budget guarantee (€19.65 billion) and the same share of the advisory budget under the InvestEU Advisory Hub. 

The EMFAF budgetary contribution to InvestEU constitutes thee ‘InvestEU Blue Economy’ initiative (which supports research, development, demonstration, upscaling, commercialization and scaling of clean technologies or environmental sustainability solutions that contribute to EU Green deal objectives in the target area of Blue Economy. 

The European Investment Fund (EIF): The EIF is part of the EIB Group. It supports Europe’s SMEs by improving their access to finance through a wide range of selected financial intermediaries. The EIF designs, promotes and implements equity and debt financing instruments targeting SMEs. In this role, EIF fosters EU objectives in support of entrepreneurship, growth, innovation, research and development, the green and digital transitions and employment. EIF is a key contributor to the Clean Oceans and the Blue Economy Group activities. In addition to the InvestEU Blue Economy program, the EIF also manages on behalf of the Portuguese national promotional institution, Instituição Financeira de Desenvolvimento (IFD), the Portugal Blue initiative a €50 million equity partnership to support Portuguese companies active in the area of blue economy. 

BlueInvest website: Maritime Forum (europa.eu)

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