Sharks Are in Trouble. This Funder Collaborative Is Working to Protect the Oceans' Apex Predators
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A CARIBBEAN REEF SHARK. MAUI TOPICAL IMAGES/shutterstock
Sharks have thrived in the earth’s oceans for at least 450 million years — they were swimming 200 million years before the dinosaurs emerged, and are still here. But despite this incredible track record of evolution and adaptation, they are no match for the global fishing industry. For decades, humans have been catching and killing an estimated 100 million sharks every year, or more than a quarter-million each day. It’s a toll that is simply more than the species can bear, says Lee Crockett, executive director of the Shark Conservation Fund, which works to protect species around the world, and many types of sharks are heading toward extinction.
But the danger to sharks goes beyond any individual variety of the gray-suited fish, factoring into the broader health of the ocean itself. So in 2016, a group of ocean and conservation-oriented funders joined forces to launch the Shark Conservation Fund, an organization designed to better understand the global picture surrounding sharks, including the basic science of shark biology, as well as the human pressures of fisheries markets and national regulations on the fishing industry and other issues that impact sharks. Today, SCF is supported by the Paul M. Angell Family Foundation, Oceans 5, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, the Moore Charitable Foundation, re:Wild (formerly the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation), the Save our Seas Foundation, the Bloomberg Philanthropies Ocean Initiative, and the Volgenau Foundation.
“Sharks are the second-most threatened group of vertebrates in the world behind amphibians,” Crockett said. “They’re not only incredibly endangered animals, but they also play an essential role in ocean ecosystems.” Scientists and conservationists have for years recognized the dangerous pressure on sharks around the world, but efforts to protect the creatures have mostly been piecemeal and inadequate to the cooperative, globe-spanning measures needed to halt the decline of shark populations and give them a chance to recover their numbers. The organization also works to protect related species of rays and of chimaera, shark-like, deep-sea fish that are also under threat.
Overfishing is the greatest threat to sharks, explained Crockett, and it is within the business of the fishing industry that the SCF conducts much of its focus and funding. Millions of sharks are caught by commercial fishing boats that are deliberately going after the fins, meat and liver oil. Other captured sharks are “bycatch” — incidental victims of fishermen pursuing other fish species, such as tuna. There are over 1,000 species of sharks and rays, but decades of this intense fishing throughout the world’s oceans have pushed more than a third of them to the brink of extinction.
The Shark Conservation Fund (SCF) works with nonprofits and NGOs around the world to preserve populations of sharks, rays and chimaera. Its grantmaking aims to advance its three primary objectives: develop effective regulation of the global trade in shark and ray products; establish or strengthen legal protections for the most imperiled sharks and rays; and combat unsustainable fishing practices. The funder’s Small Grants program provides grants up to $25,000 from an annual pot of $250,000, typically making 10 grants per year. The goal, said Crockett, is to build the capacity of NGOs working to protect sharks and rays, particularly in developing countries near important shark habitats.
The Shark Conservation Fund is also working to establish marine protected areas — regions of the ocean where fishing is restricted to leave sharks and other marine species some breathing room. Last month, SCF launched its new Shark Biodiversity Initiative: a 10-year, $100 million global initiative to protect the biodiversity of our oceans through shark conservation. SCF describes the initiative as a first-of-its-kind global effort that will dedicate the financial, strategic and human resources needed to protect sharks and their habitats.
An important predator in danger
As predators, sharks play a crucial role in the balance of ocean ecosystems and food webs, Crockett said. One study in Australia, in the aptly named Shark Bay, found that tiger sharks in those waters protected sea grass — a crucial link in the ocean environment that experienced a massive die-off due to a heat wave. The sharks eat and scare off the dugongs and turtles that graze on the seagrass. Without the sharks, the seagrass would disappear under the unchecked grazing, as would many of the other creatures that ate or depended on the plants. It’s a story reminiscent of the unexpected benefits of the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone Park: The wolves rebalanced elk and deer populations, allowed overgrazed willow and aspen trees to return to the landscape, and even stabilized riverbanks and allowed the ailing rivers to recover. As predators, sharks play a similar role in ocean health, scientists and conservationists say.
Sharks are caught as a food fish for their meat, said Crockett, but it’s their fins alone that have the highest commercial value, particularly in China and other parts of Asia, where shark fin soup is considered a luxury dish. Although there’s a market for other parts of the shark, the fins are so much more valuable that some fishing boat captains fill their holds with only the fins to maximize profits. This has led to the brutal and widely condemned practice of “shark finning,” slicing the fins off the still-living shark and dumping it back into the ocean to die.
The critical role sharks play in ocean ecosystems, combined with such widespread threats, prompted the creation of the Shark Conservation Fund. The effort grew out of another conservation funder, Oceans 5, when several board members decided that efforts to protect sharks and rays warranted a dedicated organization.
Chuck Fox, executive director of Oceans 5 and also an advisory board member of Shark Conservation Fund, says the pressure on sharks has increased dramatically as populations of fish species around the planet have diminished. “Historically, we’ve tended to focus fisheries management on commercially important seafood, like tuna or pollock, as opposed to species like sharks,” he said. “But over the last 40 years, fishermen have started to fish any big fish — like sharks — because they simply have more meat on their body.” With the exception of a few countries, including the U.S. and Australia, sharks have been virtually unregulated, and their populations have been hunted nearly to disappearance.
Pooling efforts
The actor Leonardo DiCaprio, well-known for his conservation philanthropy, was also a founding partner in 2013 of the Elephant Crisis Fund, which provided a similar model of a species-specific organization like the SCF. And like SCF, the Elephant Crisis Fund addressed commercial threats to elephants, such as ivory trafficking that leads to poaching, and the creation of protected land where elephants can live and recover their numbers.
“The idea of the collaborative is it allows philanthropists to pool their money,” said Crockett. “Individually, they may not be able to do a lot, but together, your impact can be a lot greater.” And to address a large problem with a comparatively small amount of money, SCF can coordinate broad international strategies.
Similarly collaborative shark conservation work was pressed successfully in Europe by the Shark Alliance, which was founded in 2006 to advocate for an E.U. Shark Action Plan, and to strengthen the E.U.’s ban on shark finning. That alliance was led by the European Elasmobranch Association, the Pew Charitable Trusts, Project Aware and Shark Trust. In a big win for sharks, in 2009, the E.U. adopted a plan for shark conservation and management policies.
Jim Angell, president of the Paul M. Angell Family Foundation and an advisory board member of SCF, decided to focus on shark conservation after a career as an environmental lawyer, which included working to protect grizzly bears in Montana. He wanted to direct the relatively new family foundation he headed, established in 2011, to include conservation along with its other funding interests in the performing arts and the alleviation of poverty.
“I spent time thinking about what niche an organization of our size could play a meaningful role in, areas of conservation work where a relatively modest investment could make a difference,” Angell said. As an avid scuba diver with a love of the ocean and the creatures who live there, he decided sharks were the answer. That began what Angell calls a steep learning curve, which led him to connect with ocean conservationists at Oceans 5 and other groups.
Angell’s experience as an environmental attorney had been U.S.-based, but shark conservation is an international mission. “A lot of the ideas that I had firmly committed to in my U.S. experience about where the levers of power are, and what were the most impactful levels of government, just didn’t apply to other places in the world,” he said. “I had to do some unlearning. It’s quite different, for example, to work in Indonesia than in the United States.”
In fact, the U.S. has a comparatively well-regulated fishing industry, and has seen some shark species thrive, like great white sharks, which spend a portion of their lives in the relative safety of the Pacific Ocean off the California coast. Or the barndoor skate, which lives off the New England coast: They were seriously threatened 20 years ago, but are now back to healthy numbers. So most of the organizations that SCF funds are outside the U.S., including throughout Asia, where the threats to sharks are greatest while some of the developing countries in the region have less money to devote to ocean science and conservation.
A long-term push
Since its inception, one of SCF’s ongoing and successful efforts (along with other conservation organizations and advocates) has been to get threatened shark species listed on the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, known as CITES. The CITES agreement provides a legal framework to regulate the international trade of animal species to better ensure their sustainability. Countries that want to continue doing business with international signatories are thus pressured to implement fisheries policies and practices that are less detrimental to species listed in the agreement. Most of the countries that engage in the shark fin trade are signed on to CITES; with sharks protected under the agreement, it’ll be easier to regulate the fin trade, Crockett said.
There was some other recent good news for sharks. Late last year, following years of advocacy by wildlife groups, President Joe Biden signed the Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act, which greatly strengthened existing laws aimed at outlawing the shark fin market entirely — at least in the U.S.
Shark conservation is a long-term project, largely because of the reproductive biology of sharks themselves, explained Crockett. They are a long-lived species and don’t reach sexual maturity until 10 to 20 years of age. When they do start to reproduce, unlike many species of fish, sharks produce few offspring. Gestation can be long, 18 months to two years. Juvenile sharks grow slowly, and thus are that much more vulnerable in their early years.
“It’s going to take 20 years before we’re going to see some notable impacts,” Crockett said.
