Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Consumers spent £1.7bn on festive lighting last year and much of it is treated as disposable UK households have thrown away an estimated 168m light-up Christmas items and other “fast-tech” gifts over the past year, a study suggests. The research by the non-profit group Material Focus found about £1.7bn was spent last year on Christmas lighting, including 39m sets of fairy lights. Continue reading...

Tapanuli orangutans survive only in Indonesia’s Sumatran rainforest where a mine expansion will cut through their home. Yet the mining company says the alternative will be worse A small brown line snakes its way through the rainforest in northern Sumatra, carving 300 metres through dense patches of meranti trees, oak and mahua. Picked up by satellites, the access road – though modest now – will soon extend 2km to connect with the Tor Ulu Ala pit, an expansion site of Indonesia’s Martabe mine. The road will help to unlock valuable deposits of gold, worth billions of dollars in today’s booming market. But such wealth could come at a steep cost to wildlife and biodiversity: the extinction of the world’s rarest ape, the Tapanuli orangutan. The network of access roads planned for this swath of tropical rainforest will cut through habitat critical to the survival of the orangutans, scientists say. The Tapanuli (Pongo tapanuliensis), unique to Indonesia, was only discovered by scientists to be a separate species in 2017 – distinct from the Sumatran and Bornean apes. Today, there are fewer than 800 Tapanulis left in an area that covers as little as 2.5% of their historical range. All are found in Sumatra’s fragile Batang Toru ecosystem, bordered on its south-west flank by the Martabe mine, which began operations in 2012. Continue reading...

npj Ocean Sustainability, Published online: 08 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s44183-025-00174-x Perceived fairness of conservation decision-making more strongly influenced by absence than presence of procedural equity criteria

npj Ocean Sustainability, Published online: 04 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s44183-025-00155-0 Reply to: “Comment to ‘Rethinking maritime security from the bottom up: four principles to broaden perspectives and centre humans and ecosystems’”