‘You can’t protect what you don’t know:’ Interview with marine scientist Loyiso Dunga

Marine scientist Loyiso Dunga began mapping South Africa's section of the Great African Seaforest in 2016, using satellite imagery and infrared filters to track chlorophyll and chart roughly 800 miles of kelp across two coasts and two oceans. Dunga, who grew up in the coastal community of Nqabara, says the mapping was a prerequisite to conservation: you cannot protect an ecosystem whose extent nobody has measured.

Dunga now leads Seas of Good Hope and works with the IUCN and the Kelp Forest Alliance, which aims to protect 9 million acres of kelp forest by 2040. He also founded Asili Blue Renaissance to push conservation policy toward incorporating Indigenous knowledge, noting that South African conservation history includes forced evictions of coastal communities under the banner of dune stabilization, later followed by hotel development on the same land.

Dunga argues the field of marine biology in South Africa remains shaped by apartheid-era exclusion, with conservation's benefits still disproportionately reaching white South Africans while Indigenous communities bore its costs. He is now working to rename kelp forests using Indigenous terminology, alongside a project called SeaWeave meant to publicize the ecosystem's value.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.