Over fifty religious leaders, spiritual authorities and civil society actors convened today at the Mombasa Continental Resort to launch the Faiths High Ambition Coalition for Ocean and Nature Action; a global alliance formally committing faith communities to measurable, transparent and accountable contributions to ocean and biodiversity conservation.
The Coalition is an initiative of Faiths for Oceans, co-led by Gopal Patel, who co-founded the organisation at the third United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC 3) in 2025.
The founding signatories represent diverse faith traditions and regions: the Anglican Communion, Bahu Trust, CYNESA (the Catholic Youth Network for Environmental Sustainability in Africa), Danmission, FutureFaith, GreenFaith Africa, the Pacific Conference of Churches, Tikkun HaYam, and the United Madrassi Association.
Interreligious leaders from Mombasa and surrounding counties participated in today’s Forum, alongside international delegates. The Coalition is open to all faith communities, large or small, as well as partner organisations.
The Faiths High Ambition Coalition for Ocean and Nature Action is a global accountability framework requiring each signatory to register at least one concrete, dated and publicly verifiable pledge; report annually on progress and support two landmark international frameworks; the 30×30 target of the Global Biodiversity Framework and the BBNJ (Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction) high seas treaty.
Commitments span six priority areas: sustainable fisheries, marine protection under 30×30, a moratorium on deep-sea mining, pollution reduction, the ocean-climate nexus and faith-based education and advocacy.
The Coalition draws on the premise that approximately 85% of the world’s population subscribes to a faith tradition, making faith communities the largest civil society constituency on the planet and one whose moral authority and community reach are largely untapped by formal conservation frameworks.
Today’s forum brought together faith leaders, indigenous custodians, artisanal fishing community representatives, scientists and ocean governance officials for a full day of structured discussion, deliberation and commitment.
The launch takes place on the eve of the 11th Our Ocean Conference (OOC11), which opens in Mombasa tomorrow as the first time this flagship global summit has been hosted on African soil, under the theme Our Ocean, Our Heritage, Our Future.
Global ocean governance has, for two decades, drawn on the authority of states, the evidence of science, the capital of finance and the energy of civil society. What it has lacked is direct, trusted reach into the communities on whose coastlines conservation has to actually happen.
Along Mombasa’s Likoni coastline, where fish stocks have reportedly declined from an average of 40 kilograms per fisherman per day to between 15 and 20, where coral bleaching linked to pollution is hollowing out the reef systems on which artisanal fisheries depend and where trust between fishing communities and government institutions has been eroded by years of unmet commitments, that gap is acutely visible.
Faith institutions, by contrast, retain the trust that formal channels have lost. Muslim Imam’s, Christian Bishops, Kaya elders and Hindu Pandits are already embedded in the daily and spiritual lives of the coastal communities where ocean conservation must ultimately take hold.
The Coalition is thus designed to convert that existing moral authority into registered, trackable commitments aligned with international conservation targets. It is also responding to an urgent timeline: the first Conference of the Parties to the BBNJ Agreement is approaching, and faith communities are positioning themselves to arrive as a recognised, organised constituency.
The Coalition operates through a simple, scalable mechanism. Each signatory, whether a small coastal congregation or a global denomination, registers a public pledge on a searchable platform hosted at oceans.faith, selects from the six priority commitment categories and reports annually on progress. Ambition is calibrated to capacity: a verifiable pledge from a rural fishing community mosque carries equal standing with a portfolio of commitments from a multinational religious body.
The coalition is also in active discussion about livelihood programmes for the coastal communities its member institutions serve, an acknowledgment that conservation without economic sustainability is not conservation at all.
For Mombasa’s fish traders and artisanal fishers, the most tangible near-term expression of the Coalition’s work will be in those programmes and in the advocacy of locally trusted faith leaders for the infrastructure; fish landing sites, cold storage and access to deeper-water fishing, that communities have identified as their most pressing needs.
