Thirteen years ago this week,
The New York Times published an op-ed I co-authored with Carl Safina. We argued that empowering coastal communities to manage their local waters could curb overfishing and revive marine ecosystems.
Soon after, Rare launched
Fish Forever, a program built on that idea — giving coastal fishers rights to manage their fisheries, backed by government support and behavior change rooted in community leadership. It was Rare’s most ambitious effort ever.
We launched Fish Forever like a start-up: with rigorous analysis, plenty of partners and advisors, and a series of pilots that taught us a great deal. Along the way, we kept two priorities in mind — local impact and scalability.
What began as three pilot sites in the Philippines now spans more than 2,000 communities across eight of the world’s most biodiverse marine nations, protecting waters larger than 17 Grand Canyons. Today, we partner with hundreds of government agencies, NGOs, and funders on a shared vision to scale this approach globally.
As I tell our board when they ask me, “What keeps you up at night?”, the century’s greatest challenges may turn out to be
human migration caused by climate change, especially when set against a backdrop of calamitous biodiversity loss.
How many people will have to move because of drought, poor soil, flooding, or extreme heat? What happens politically when hundreds of millions leave their homelands in search of better lives? How does xenophobia rear its ugly head? What does fear-based populism do to democracy? What effect will this mass movement have on nature and the prospects of future generations?
This is the next big thing — and it presents a terrifying and unavoidable challenge. What can we do to help the world’s most vulnerable people thrive where they were born? How might we identify and scale solutions that build ecological, economic, social, and cultural resilience, especially in the Global South? And how can we achieve this amid a marked retreat from development assistance?
Rare was founded in the early 1970s to protect critically endangered species. Over time, we established a unique niche in community-led conservation, informed by insights from human-centered design and behavioral science. Given the mounting risks so many communities face, the coming decades will reveal how essential a human-centric approach is to conservation success.
To meet the moment, Rare is setting its sights on a 2040 vision in which millions of people in the most biodiverse regions aren’t just surviving the climate crisis — they’re leading the way toward a more resilient planet.
Our strategy rests on four pillars: